The Florist Secret Behind the “Floating” Flower Arrangement

Hello, flower friends. You've probably seen these viral designs on your Instagram or your Pinterest board. Today, I'm pulling back the curtain on how to make a floating flower arrangement, also called a meadow arrangement. Now, these arrangements, you'll see them everywhere. They're on the ground at ceremonies. They are on tablescapes. They're hanging off of mantles. The first thing you need to do is choose a vessel that's very low. Now, this is just a glass dish. You could use a plastic dish, also called a loamy dish. The key is that it's gonna be low because we're gonna completely cover it. You're not gonna be able to see the vase at all. You're not gonna be able to see the mechanics at all. So I'm gonna use two mechanics in this. I'm gonna use a pin frog. This is a floral frog that has metal pins on it. It's very sharp. I'm going to putty it into the bottom of my vase. You can use things like plumber's putty. You could use alien tape. Those are things that I've used before and made videos about before. Today, I'm gonna be using floral putty from Floral Genius. This is the old cling. If you ever used cling before and then it went off the market during 2020, it's back and Floral Genius has it. This is my favorite way to stick a frog and I'm just so thrilled that it's back on the market. So basically, I'm gonna take a little piece of this putty and I am going to stretch it along the bottom of my frog so that it covers the full circle. And when I stick it to the bottom, I'm going to just stick it right down. I don't want any water to get underneath the putty or underneath the frog. I'm gonna use a second mechanic with my floral frog. The first time I ever made one of these, I made a flat piece of chicken wire that went squished down in the bottom of my vase like this. This is how I would normally use chicken wire. This did not work at all, zero. It was a total flop. Put my flowers in, they all fell out because they only have an inch of support. What I realized is that I really need to make more of a dome that has a little bit of height. So this is maybe now four inches or five inches of height. And I'm just gonna, you know, sort of wedge this into my frog. I'm gonna use a piece of waterproof tape to tape it in. But now what this does is allow me to get height on my arrangement, which is what this arrangement's gonna be like, by using this chicken wire and my frog. So they kind of do two different things. The frog is gonna hold your stems securely in place and the chicken wire is going to allow you to create a tall design in a very short vase. So usually when we're thinking about proportion, we think about making an arrangement one and a half times the height of the vase. We're throwing that rule out today. That is not how we are gonna make this design. We are looking for something that is tall because normally these are gonna be put either on the ground or on a pedestal or maybe even a mantle that you wanna get some height on. So we are going to throw our proportion rule out today. I always say it's good to know the rules, but sometimes you have to throw them out. I'm just using this waterproof tape to keep my dome in place. All right, so now I'm gonna fill this with water. Since this vase is so short, I am gonna fill it up pretty high. And now my goal as I'm creating this design is to completely cover the vase and completely cover the mechanic. So wherever you place it, this looks like it's growing out of the ground. I heard somebody call it a table garden. These are often called meadow pieces, but basically it's going to look like it's growing out of the ground. So I'm gonna start with some large leaf foliage. This is oak leaf hydrangea. You could use any large leaf foliage. I'm also gonna use these as a way to help me start to create the shape. I want this to feel really natural. I'm only gonna use one flower in this arrangement. So I want it to have a lot of interesting texture, a lot of interesting foliage. I am even going to start to put this in really low down here at the lip of my vase so that you can see I'm already starting to cover. One way that will help you do this is if you keep your stems kind of long. You don't want anything too tight. Really want these big leaves to cover with their width. Now you can see already that I'm starting to cover the bottom of my vase so that this is gonna feel really natural wherever it's sitting. This is Solomon's seal. Variegated Solomon's seal is one of my favorite foliages. I love it because you can see it has very straight, stiff stems and it's gonna be great to give height. So as I'm making this, I do not want this to be overcrowded. I don't want this to feel jam-packed. This is supposed to feel very natural, like it's growing out of the ground. If you, like me, sometimes have a tendency to overcrowd things, I have a guide that can help you. I'll put a link in the description. This is my guide to help overstuffers because you're like me, you have a tendency to overstuff. So I really wanna keep things pretty loose, pretty light. And I'm making this pretty wide. You can see this because oftentimes these are used in conjunction with other arrangements. So you might make five of these and put them down the aisle. So you wanna get as much coverage as you can with a single piece. When you're using these large leaves at the bottom, I don't want it to feel, for me, like everything is oak leaf hydrangea on the bottom and then everything else is above it. I wanna make sure I'm interspersing different foliages with the oak leaf hydrangeas so that they're not so visually heavy. I wanna mix them up. I don't have a ton of eucalyptus, but I always like to use this because it does add a little bit of scent and a little bit of a different look to your arrangement. And I'm thinking that this is gonna be a side that's a little bit taller, and this side is gonna be a little bit lower and wider. Next, I'm gonna add some seed pods of Queen Anne's Lace or Dara. And these, if you're making an arrangement like this for a ceremony outside, a wedding ceremony outside, or some sort of party outside, these are fantastic because these really add to that meadow feeling. They're so cool, so interesting, and I love to just use them as their whole stem. These actually have a little bit of the flower still on them and a little bit of the pods. And those I did put in my frog to give it more of an upright look. And now I'm just gonna fill in a few more of these throughout my design. You could use other kinds of seed pods if you had them. You could use Nigella seed pods. They would be really fun. You could also use Ping Pong Scabiosa. I feel like that's like a fun one to use that gives a little bit of a meadowy feel. If you had more grasses or wheat, especially in the fall, wheat would be fun. Another foliage that I'm using is, this is some Coleus. If you're a home gardener or just somebody who goes to a garden center ever, you'll see there are a million types of Coleus. This is a beautiful lime green one, and it really starts to look great in the fall. I'm gonna add a little bit of this. It actually has a little bit of a lettuce-y texture. And then I'm gonna also add a little bit of flowering oregano. This is so fragrant and cute, and it's gonna mimic sort of that look of the seed pods of the Queen Anne's Lace. Again, adding a really fun meadowy feel. Now, this is super natural in design. You will also see arrangements like this, floating arrangements where there's no foliage at all. They are all a single flower, like sunflowers or dahlias. That is another way to do it. You would create it almost the exact same way, but instead of covering with foliage, you would use flowers. Most of the times, you see those on a much smaller scale because the cost of doing an arrangement like that can really skyrocket. So a lot of times when you see arrangements that are on the ground or on a mantle, they're really gonna be based in foliage. All right, so I've got a pretty good shape. Now, I'm only going to, for this arrangement, I'm keeping it really simple today. I'm gonna be just using one type of sunflower. That's it. These are totally new to me, and I am obsessed with them. This is called Darjeeling. These are from Johnny's. I believe they're from Johnny's. My friend John McEwen from Locust Point Flowers tried them for the first time this year. He said he bought just a seed packet of 50 and tried them, and now he too is obsessed with them. So we both really love them. The color is just so beautiful. Now, you can make these front-facing if you want. You can make them in the round. If you're making them for something like an aisle marker, so where they're gonna be bumped up against a ceremony chair, you might wanna focus on them being front-facing, but you still would wanna fill in this back because what you don't want to happen, and believe me because I've had it happen before, is that you make something really one-sided front-facing and the entire thing gets too heavy and it flips over. So I'm gonna start to put these sunflowers in, and when you're using sunflowers clustered together, couple things to remember. Don't cut them so that they're all the same length, like everything this length. You wanna vary the lengths, and also you wanna vary the plane, and what I mean by that is like some are further back, some are further forward. You're staggering how these blooms look so that they give dimension instead of feeling really flat. One of the things that happens a lot of times with these types of arrangements is that people put the flowers in so that they're all exactly on the same plane, and then it starts to feel really flat. So we want things to reach out and stretch and feel really natural. All right, so you can see I'm starting to move my sunflowers around a little bit. I'm not having them all front-facing, flat against the front. I'm sort of twisting them, turning them, letting them do what they do naturally. All right, I've got just two more sunflowers. I'm gonna keep this pretty front-facing today. I'm just going to double-check that you can't see any of that chicken wire dome, and that you can't see the vase on the bottom. All right, this is our floating meadow arrangement. It looks like it's growing out of the ground. You can't see the vase. You can't see the mechanics. And remember, I'll put in the notes a link to my guide on not overstuffing.