Picture Picnic 🅿🅿: Vintage Laboratory Jars

It's Hydrangea season and I found some fabulous bright pink Hydrangea with very long stems. Tall flowers are not always easy to arrange. Here is what I did!

It's always a pleasure and lots of fun to buy a bunch of flowers for the weekend and this series of blog posts, called 'A Bunch for the Weekend, will show you how you can make quick and easy flower arrangements for your home.

Buy the flowers where it's convenient and easy for you whether that is from a flower stall, farmers' market, the supermarket or a florist.

Always try to buy seasonal flowers - they will be a lot cheaper.

Make sure you condition the flowers as soon as you get home. Remove any foliage that will end up below the waterline in the vase. Trim the ends of the stems at an angle and put in fresh water as soon as possible.

I have three quite large, clear glass bottles with quite narrow necks. Tall containers with narrow necks are not always the best proportions for flowers - so they don't get used that often.

Well, here was an opportunity to try them out on my long stemmed Hydrangea.

I wanted to keep the stems as tall as possible - so these old vintage bottles turned out to be perfect. I only had five stems - so I knew I could only put one or two stems in each bottle.

Tall stems demands tall containers - but they also have to sit right in the container. If the neck is too wide you need a lot of stems and as we all know that will end up expensive.

The heads of the hydrangeas are also rather big - but tall stems, big flower heads and tall containers with narrow necks turned out perfect.

I will also later dry the flowers - so they will give me even more pleasure over the autumn and winter months.

A win, win situation!

Enjoy your flower arranging and have a fabulous and floral Friday and a great weekend!

Thank you for visiting 'Of Spring and Summer' - I will be back On Sunday with a floral quote by a well known British stylist, journalist and author .

Ingrid

~ xoxo ~

[Styling, photography and text © Ingrid Henningsson/Of Spring and Summer.]

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I'm back after the summer break with another 'A Bunch for the Weekend' and this time I'm using a bunch of Freesia in a gorgeous pink colour.

Freesia is a delight to work with - it's scented, has few leaves to remove, has strong stems, comes in many different pretty colours, it's easy to remove spent flowers and it's long-lasting.

Freesia often has lots of shorter stems full of little buds. These stems are usually positioned low down on the larger stems so you often need to remove them.

Instead of putting them straight on the compost heap I sometimes gather them up and put them in a little container and arrange it next to the main vase.

These buds hardly ever open up but they work as a linear and interesting contrast to the main arrangement.

I have used a medium sized vintage laboratory jar for the large arrangement. I made a spiralled handtied arrangement this time as I thought the stem would look pretty through the glass jar.

Freesia flowers work very well on their own and you don't really need anything else mixed in with them. Just by themselves they have so much texture, colour and beauty.

Here is a trick for you!
Freesia flowers open from the bottom and by removing some of the buds on the long arching raceme you can stimulate the opening of buds further down the stem.

I happen to like the long arching stems so I only remove buds on some of the flowers to encourage more buds to flower.