Rittners School Of Floral Design
In Boston Presents....

How To Make A Lovely Basket Arrangement Of Flowers

Most people love a big basket flowing with the abundant and rich look of a wide variety of flowers. These designs can be used for so many purposes. They are ideal for an entry way or hall. They make wonderful and impressive gifts. They can be used for decorating a large function space. The style is often used in lobby areas.

Yet, for the beginning floral designer making a design like this can seem quite intimidating, for they look so complicated and hard to make.

At Rittners Floral School our job is to make learning floral designing easy and fun. We want you to see how you can make a floral design that will be the envy of all of your friends and be greatly appreciated by your loved ones.

What You Will Need

We start this design by placing our piece of foam into a container. The base that we are using is a wicker basket. Baskets have always been popular. However today they are even more popular than ever before, and florists are importing them from all over the world. The important thing that you realize is that when working with a basket you must have some sort of plastic liner to place inside prior to placing the foam. If you do not take this precaution, you will have water leaking all over the place. Place the foam into the container, and then using specialized florist tape, attach it in place to the top of the base.

The overall shape of this design is roughly a half a sphere. If you think of the northern hemisphere of the earth you will have the idea. To establish that, we start with our snapdragon. Snapdragons are a lovely flower, and come in a variety of colors. The tall spikey shape enables us to form the general boundaries of this design. First we place a snapdragon into the center of the design. Next we place a few more along the baseline, working around in a circle.

Notice that in covering our mechanics we have used spanish moss. This is placed very loosely so that we can continue to add stems of flowers. If you find that it is hard to get your stems into the foam through the spanish moss, place the flowers first and add moss at the end of your designing. Alternatively if you don't like moss, you can certainly use any of a wide variety of foliages (eg. plumosa, ming fern, etc.)

Once we know how tall we want to make the design, and how far out we want to come along the sides, we take more of our snapdragon and fill in, working the flowers in between the top single flower and the flowers on the sides. You can see that as we start to fill in the gap between the top and the base, how the overall design is starting to take shape.

Let's take another flower, in this case some pom pons. and continue to fill in. The variety that we are using is the daisy pom, which actually looks somewhat like a daisy, but has a much longer stem, and lasts a lot better. Poms generally have multiple florets on a stem, and so to get the greatest possible coverage, let's thin the stem out a bit, placing some of the shorter flowers down near the base. By doing this we are able to get an enormous amount of coverage from our flowers. Place the flowers first at the top, then down at the base, and finally in the center. Turn the design around as you add the flowers, so that your placement will be even on all sides. This is a design meant to be viewed on all sides. Next start adding a few roses into the mix.

After adding our roses to the design, we add a few other flowers, mixing them through the entire unit. A second variety of poms are used here, white cushion poms, and then a bunch of miniature carnations. Finally some statice is used to provide texture & contrast.

The overall effect is very rich. Notice that we are using both more pricey flowers such as snapdragons and roses, and mixing them with common poms & carnations. There are some designers who get very snobby about their mixtures. As I think you can see in this example, mixing a few more expensive flowers with a few more common varieties can still give a very nice effect. It can also help you control your costs as these designs can become quite expensive. In other words, try not to limit yourself with regards to flower selections.

We hope that you really enjoyed this brief floral design lesson. At Rittners Floral School in Boston we provide floral design instruction that includes a wide range of different styles and techniques. Please come and take one of our hands-on workshop programs!!