If you're lucky enough to find yourself presented with a beautiful bouquet of freshly cut flowers on Valentine’s Day — but don’t know what to do with them — then I'm here to help. While the flowers and foliage may look pristine wrapped in paper or cellophane wrap, once you remove the tie and place them in a vase, the exquisite bunch of blooms can look far from delightful.
Although it might look easy, arranging flowers in a vase is tricky. These long-stemmed beauties have a life of their own and need a helping hand to look their best. I say all this from experience, as I spent many of my student days working in a flower shop.
Being a florist was never my career goal, but I picked up a few clever hacks, including one I want to share with you right now.
Keep steady
Florists use a specific product to keep flower arrangements in place, and it's known a oasis, or florist foam. It’s used when arranging posies, which you might see displayed on the table at a wedding party or as flower basket arrangements for occasions like Mother’s Day.
The foam holds the flowers in place, but it also absorbs water, meaning the flowers don’t need to be placed in a vase.
However, the challenge of arranging flowers in a vase is that you can't use flower foam to keep them in place, so instead of them staying where you want them to go, they move out of place, and your beautifully wrapped gift can look dishevelled and untidy.
One of the easiest hacks to keep your flowers in place is to use this quick tip — and it involves a cheap household item that every home has tucked away at the back of a drawer.
Clean up
First, you’ll need a clean vase, as you won’t want to show off your blooms in a vase covered in grime. I placed a denture tablet into my vase, topped it with warm water, and waited for the solution to stop fizzing before I cleaned away any leftover grime with a toothbrush.
I then rinsed the vase and dried it with a microfiber cloth.
Get sticky
I was ready to apply my quick and easy hack to the vase. Taking a narrow width of sticky tape at 0.4 inches (I used double-sided tape for demonstration purposes), I formed a square lattice pattern on the top of the vase and took the tape down to less than 0.2 inches on the vase’s side.
Before placing the flowers into the vase, remove the ends of the stems. Take a pair of clean pruning shears and cut the stems at a diagonal — this gives a larger area for water to be absorbed than a straight cut.
The size of the lattice you make will depend on the size of the neck of your vase, and the width of your flower stems, as not all flowers gifted this time of year are red roses.
Personally, I prefer something that’s not quite so mainstream, as it demonstrates a little more thought. So, if you’ve received sunflowers as an alternative flower on Valentine's Day, you’ll need to make the spacing larger than if you’ve received tulips or ranunculus.
I formed a grid with the tape by eye, but you could use a tape measure for accuracy.
What does the tape do?
The tape acts as a grid to support the flower stems in the vase, holding them in place to keep the floral display looking attractive. And if any of the tape shows over the side, you should be able to disguise it with some foliage.
What’s so great about this flower-arranging hack? The cost of the tape is minimal, and it forms an invisible grid over the top of your vase. But while double-sided tape is thinner than standard sticky tape, I found it’s not as solid, so you might prefer to use single-sided tape for a firmer hold.
And the result? You'll end up with is neat looking arrangement worthy of a florist's professional touch.
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