Two Easy Floral Arrangements Made with Short-Stemmed Garden Flowers

There's nothing wrong with being short. Hi, welcome to another video. My name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a florist with over 30 years experience designing weddings and events sharing all things floral with you each week. Today we're going to solve the problem of flowers with stems that are too short. As an avid gardener I love to go out and pick roses for my own garden but often the stems are way too short. So what are you going to do with these flowers? Today I'm going to show you two easy and elegant arrangements utilizing shorter stem flowers. Are you ready? Let's get started. So the first arrangement we're going to do is inspired by this beautiful chinoiserie little pagoda that I found at HomeGoods. It was like $20 and it's a candle holder so it came with a little glass cylinder that fits over a pillar candle but of course I'm going to use it to hold flowers. What I have here is just a little flat plastic tray that I sprayed gold to coordinate with our golden chinoiserie pagoda and I thought it'd be fun to show you you know a novel way to use short stem flowers that's not necessarily just little tiny you know arrangements all over the house. As gardeners when we go out to pick flowers to use often the garden roses that we grow have really short stems and what do you do? They're too short to fit in a vase. I mean you can put in a little vase like this but it's kind of precarious and I thought I'd show you some interesting ways to use short stem flowers. So I have a quarter block of floral foam in here taped down in this little tray and this is just kind of a fun vessel. It kind of reminds me of designing in a birdcage for instance but I like the chinoiserie aesthetic and it goes with my house and so I thought okay let's do an arrangement in here. I have here an assortment of roses I cut from the garden this morning and a lot of them are David Austen's. They're heavily scented and they're just an array of colors from peachy pinks to clear pinks to reds just all sort of analogous colors and I think it'd be a very romantic beautiful arrangement in here and very luxe looking and we're just going to go ahead and play. I'm going to start with this salmon color rose. This rose is called Tournament of Roses. It's a really really great rose to grow in the garden. It's a floribunda rose, been around for a long time and it's very prolific and very long lasting the flowers. We're just going to go ahead and put our first stem in. You know that's even too tall I'm going to cut a little shorter so I'm just envisioning a kind of compact clustered arrangement of roses without a lot of anything else and so this is very easy to do and you can do it with short stem roses in your garden and you don't need a ton of it but I promise you the effect is going to be very very beautiful very designed and more interesting than if you just did an arrangement in a vase. You guys know I'm all about novelty containers and sometimes they're not meant to be for flowers but we can figure out ways to use it. This rose I'm putting in right now is one of my favorites is Lady Emma Hamilton. It's a David Austin rose that I grow. This is our friend Gertrude Jekyll. It's another gorgeous rose here one of my favorites not the longest lasting called the Huntington rose that's another David Austin rose. It's got that beautiful perfect cabbage rose form in a clear pink just gorgeous. I really want to showcase that I'm going to put that in the very center. We've got a couple more of these crimson color roses this is from a red climber and I don't remember the name of the climber it's been so long since I planted it and I don't have the tag anymore and I've totally forgotten what it's called. Another stem of Lady Emma Hamilton and so you could do it monochromatic you could do it colorful. I wanted to show you an arrangement with all different colors that you might not think go together because that's kind of what you will sometimes that's all you that's all you have in the garden. You go out there and you pick and then you know you just only have these hodgepodge stems of flowers but if you have a unifying idea then it could be really a beautiful design. These are two little buds from a rose called Princess Anne. It's one of my newer David Austin roses. Let's see what else I have here. This is a stem of a scoble from David Austin and this is also a great way to use stems that are kind of weak that are not too strong. As gardeners you really want to showcase you know all your hard work right. I'm not one of those people who are reluctant to cut from my garden. I love cutting from the garden and using from the garden because a few stems less in the garden you will never notice but then a few stems of flowers in the house makes a big impact. That's sort of my philosophy so I'm very happy to cut my roses to use. I'm going to remove that because I want to add this spray of Rosarium Utterson. It's a beautiful climber. I had tons of this. I had a rose tunnel. It got destroyed when we put our pool in but I was able to rescue one of the plants and now I have it against a wall or fence and hopefully in a few years it'll grow nice and big. Okay I'm going to turn around. I think that is it. I think we're mostly done right. This is a very pretty rose called Earth Angel. It's got rained on a lot lately so I had to pull out the stems that are not so pretty but I like how it's also that cabbage rose look. Put a few in here just for the texture. Almost looks like a ranunculus. Okay maybe there's room for another bud of this Earth Angel over here. See how you can even use the shortest little stems in an arrangement like this? This arrangement almost reminds me of when we make cake toppers. It's larger than a cake topper but it's reminiscent of how we do cake toppers when I was doing a lot of weddings. Okay and then we're done. Super easy. Doesn't take a ton of design skill but it really features the beautiful colors and romantic textures of the roses that you can grow from your garden. Now I want a little bit of something to cascade out from the sides so I chose some stems of Deutzia that I have growing in the garden right now. This is Deutzia, kind of like a lilac. I'm going to add a few sprigs of Deutzia to cascade out the side of the arrangement so it doesn't look too much like a ball. Now Deutzia is not the longest lasting material like lilacs but I'm dipping it in Quick Dip which I show you every week. It's a really great product that helps hydrate flowers especially flowers like lilacs and Deutzia or like Philadelphus that have woody stems and are hard to use in arrangements. Just using a little bit around the perimeter to give it a little bit of wispiness and a little different texture and it's such a novel fun material to use. The bloom season on Deutzia is not very long, maybe three four weeks so you know when it's blooming I like to use it. I also have a white Deutzia that's totally different. This Deutzia is huge. It's like oh I want to say eight feet tall. I have it growing in kind of a shady part of my garden in the wild part of my garden and the other Deutzia I have is white and it is tiny only maybe one foot tall. It has little white blossoms and looks very different from this. So there are a lot of different kinds of Deutzia. So we're all done with that little Chinoiserie pagoda arrangement. It's so charming. I could put this in my living room and it's so beautiful, colorful and very luxe looking right and that's just using little short stems of flowers that you find in your garden. The second arrangement is something those of you who've been watching me for a while know I love. I love these little mini vases and they're very inexpensive. You can buy them on Amazon. They're probably like a dollar each in sets of 12, 24, 36 you know whatever quantities you need and they're very pretty. They look like little bud vases. Some of them look like old-fashioned perfume containers and there's an assortment and I'll put a link in the description below where you can buy this on Amazon. Definitely buy a set for yourself of 6 or 12 and they're so versatile. You're going to love it. So little vases like this are great and they're indispensable for putting together a really fast arrangement with only a few short stems and I like to unify the look with some kind of a container. I've done this in you know two-tier kind of cupcake trays and this is just an elegant little silver tray that I have. I have just a grouping of five little vases around a taller center vase and when you buy a set of these are going to be all different heights and you know different finishes and sizes and we're going to go ahead and use all the leftover flowers from what we cut from the garden. All different kinds of little roses. Super easy to do. I also cut some sprigs of main hair fern from my friend garden and just random little you know roses from the garden in different colors very much like the pagoda arrangement we just did. So I'm going to start with a tall vase. Just a stem of rose in there. Maybe a little filler flower. I've got a little bit of this lacy or leia. Whatever color you want your center arrangement to be and then I'm going to add a sprig of maiden hair fern in here just to have a little bit of green and that wispiness that I love. Okay and then we're going to add a rose on the back side of this because we don't want it to be one-sided. So I don't know which one I'm going to use. Maybe this little pink one. Pink rose here and it's just so fun. Just play. You know just make little combinations of roses that you like in different colors. There's no right or wrong to this. You just kind of add little roses. I've got this Christopher Marlowe from David Austin here. A very pretty salmony color. This is a little tiny bud of royal wedding. I'm going to put in here and I like the hodgepodge look. I think it's very charming, very romantic. I have all these different colors mixed in. A little sprig of white. I do have a little or leia here. Just dipping this in quick dip so it'll last longer and the great thing about these little arrangements is one rose starts looking not so great. Just pull it out. You can always, you know, the other ones are still looking good. Just add one rose and you can have this on your kitchen table or wherever you want in your boudoir. Whatever. Wherever you want a little flower accent and you could just change out the roses as they age and you don't have to redo the arrangement all at once. It's nice to have fresh flowers in the house. I know that it's also kind of labor intensive to be doing new arrangements every few days, right? So I'm always giving you strategies where you can use not a lot of flowers and enjoy roses in your home. Flowers in your home or if you don't have a garden you can conversely just buy roses, not a lot of roses, just a few sprigs for a pretty arrangement that can last you quite a while. Just making sure I'm mixing up the colors. I've got some of these beautiful white roses. This is a ground cover rose called Alba Maidlin that I have growing around my fountain. I've got thousands of these blooms right now and they're gorgeous. I feel very lucky to have that and this is the only way to kind of use it because it's so short, right? It's a ground cover rose. It has very sturdy stems and it's very long lasting. Here's a pretty orange rose. Another stem of our Lady Emma Hamilton. Think about how each rose contrasts with the rose next to it. So even though we're designing these individually, kind of think about how they look all together because it's really just one arrangement in different little sections. The main hair fern is so delicate the tips keep breaking off. I love that fresh green wispiness. I'm just going to add some throughout because we don't need any heavy greenery in here. The greenery I'm using, the main hair fern, is really just an accent to set off the colors of your roses and to provide that fresh pop of green. I always think this fresh pop of green really sets off the other colors in your arrangement. That's why I love using a little bit of greenery even though, you know, we don't really need it to fill in space or anything like that. Here's another pretty stem of this red climber. I think I'm going to take this peach rose out, put the red one in here. There we go. I like the vibrance. Here's some more stems of short orlea. And sometimes when you're cutting and if your roses grow sort of in cluster, like blooms in a cluster, like a floribunda rose and a lot of the David Austin roses, and there's all these beautiful buds and you have just one center bloom blooming, you can cut that center bloom off even though it's short and use it here without cutting that whole stem before the other buds are ready to bloom. Sometimes I do that because it'll be like so many stems, so many buds that I feel bad cutting it, but then there's like a perfect bloom in the center. So this is a good way to utilize flowers like that. So once you have a set of these little vases, it's really easy to do a very pretty arrangement for your powder room. Right now in my bathroom, my guest bathroom, I have like a little silver oval tray, but there's just two of these vases in there. And it's very effective to have a little fresh flower in the bathroom. I almost always make an arrangement for the powder room because I think it's really nice to have fresh flowers in the bathroom. It's an elegant little touch, you know, for your guests that they'll notice. There's a little sprig of orlea, so pretty, just the bud. Now orlea is a cut and come flower, so just don't be shy about cutting it, because the more you cut it, the more it blooms. Don't let it go to seed until you want it to go to seed. There's some more short stems of orlea. I'm also growing some real Queen Anne's Lace this year, and I'm going to grow some cosmos as well. I'll let you know how that goes. I see Queen Anne's Lace just growing wild around here. I wish it would invade my garden as a weed. Very pretty, just looking to see if I want to add any more colors to this. I really want to use this big stem. This is called Jubilee Celebration. It's a very interesting rose. The outer petals are darker pink, and as it blooms, it's a sort of a sherbet-y orange. Really gorgeous. Another David Austin rose. It didn't do well for many years, so now finally it's taking off and doing great. So that was fun and not very difficult. As always, please like and subscribe and click the little bell to be notified when I put out a new video. For those of you who watch me every week, hello! I love hearing from my loyal viewers each week, so send me a comment to let me know what you're up to. Please share your beautiful creations with your fellow flower lovers in the community section of my channel. So until next time, remember, flowers are life's little luxuries, so go out and indulge yourself, and I will see you in my next video.