If you don’t want to or need to send flowers out of town and if you are interested in working with flowers yourself, we have the perfect summer activity for you: Create your own European style flower arrangment.

Gather flowers from your back yard, get them from a close-by shop or even pick some at a wild flower field and you are ready to get started. We hope you will enjoy this is a short tutorial on European style hand-tied flower arranging.

The European style bouquet or hand-tied bouquet is the predominant bouquet-making technique in Europe. Customers would just walk into their local florist shop, select a few flowers they like and the florist would create a beautiful bouquet right in front of them.

Although this technique is simple and fast to learn, the European style is not wide spread in the US, where florists still compose the traditional vase arrangements. This short tutorial will help you to create your very own hand-tied flower bouquet.

About Flowers

The most crucial part of flower arranging, besides the design and right combination of flowers, is the quality of plant material used. It is easy to get overcharged on aged blooms unless you can recognize a flower in good condition. Most flowers should be bought in bud stage with the color showing through. Exceptions are gerbera and daisies, which are sold fully-grown and open.

These days almost all flowers are available year round. However, it does make sense to stick to seasonal flowers, as they are especially fresh and inexpensive while they are in season.

Here is a rough guideline for flower availability and seasonality:

- Spring bulbs, such as tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths are widely available in spring between the months of February and May.
- Peonies can be bought between April and the beginning of June for a really good price.
- Sunflowers are native in the US between July and October.
- Dahlias are available in early fall.
- Roses, lilies, iris, gerbera and daisies, in fact all chrysanthemums are available year round for approximately the same price. However, prices for flowers, in particular roses, increase two or threefold during Valentine’s Day season.

Focal Flowers, Filler Flowers and Greenery

Every traditional hand-tied bouquet is made of at least one type of focal flower, one or multiple types of filler flowers and one or multiple types of greens. I would define a focal flower as a larger single stem flower, its head being at least one inch in diameter such as roses, gerbera, mums (= single stem Chrysanthemums), iris etc.

Filler flowers on the other hand usually feature several smaller heads and buds on one stem. Widely available filler flowers are Baby’s Breath, Montecasino Asters, Statice, Limonium, Mini-Carnations, Daisies (= spray Chrysanthemums), Solidago, etc.

Greens are pretty self-explanatory. They do not have any floral element on them other than perhaps small berry-like seeds such as those found on seeded Eucalyptus and Pepper berries. Greens are used to round out the bouquet and as a support structure on the outside of the bouquet. Their different shapes and shades of green can be used for great design elements.

European Style hand-tied bouquet

The three basic flower-arranging techniques are foam arrangements, vase arrangements and hand-tied bouquets. In the following we want to focus on the hand-tied bouquets.

As the name suggests, those bouquets are arranged in your hand instead of in a container. This way you can select the best fitting container or vase, once your “art work” is completed. Another advantage is that it is a lot faster to assemble and you can always change your mind and start over, which cannot as easily be done with a foam arrangement. Finally, you can simply wrap your bouquet in a nice paper or cellophane wrap and bring it as a gift.

Step by step bouquet making

Tools of the trade:
Cutters or florist knife
Bindwire
Rose De-thorner to cut the thorns

Clean the flower stems by stripping all foliage below 7″ off the tip of the flowers. Use a rose de-thorner for the roses. Above the 7” mark, take off all leaves and flower petals that are broken, turning brown or are otherwise damaged.
1. Place each flower stem about 45 degrees in front of the previous one, so that you create a spiral form. Simply cross the previous stem, the flower head always facing to the left.
2. After every new stem you add, turn the bouquet about ¼ turn in your hand.
3. The final bouquet should have a round shape, looking at it from the side. You achieve this by positioning each additional flower a bit lower than the previous one.
4. Cut off the ends of the stems. The total bouquet length depends on the container you will use. It is crucial that all the flower stems have the same length, so that they can be hydrated and the bouquet stands upright in the vase.
5. There should not be any leaves below the point where you hold the bouquet in your hand - where the stems criss-cross at about 7” to 8” below the tips of the tallest flower heads in the center of the bouquet. Here the stems are tied with a wire tie. Cut a piece of wire about 8” to 10” and wrap it twice around the stems, fasten it by twisting the ends a few times. Cut off the loose ends and bend the twisted wire so that it is less visible.
6. The true test of every hand-tied bouquet is to see whether it will stand on its own, without the support of a container. If it does, you know that you have done a good jobJ.

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial on European style hand-tied bouquet making. We would be very interested in your creative works, so please send us your feedback and photos of your floral art.

Have you ever heard of the corpse flower? The world’s most foul-smelling flower that puts out an aroma not unlike rotting meat or fish? Crowds flocked to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Friday to see what the big stink was about — the rare blooming of a cultivated amorphophallus titanum, one of the world’s largest flowers. Here is the story from Chris Michaud for Reuters.

“I had to wear a respirator,” said Alessandro Chiari, a plant propagator who, along with garden foreman Mark Fisher, raised the flower from a pea-sized tuber to maturity at more than 5 feet.

“It comes in waves,” Chiari said of the plant’s foul smell, which serves the purpose of attracting hungry bees and insects that pollinate its female flowers. The plant, also called a titan arum, does not pollinate itself.

One of the air-monitoring technicians said the smell made her eyes water and the greenhouse’s windows were opened for ventilation.

As fate would have it, the aroma peaked during the wee hours when the garden was closed and some who turned out to get a whiff seemed almost disappointed to have missed its peak.

“It’s actually a very organic kind of smell,” said Adam Husted of Brooklyn. “I don’t know if it’s really putrid though.”

As crowds snapped photos and sniffed the plant, one visitor said she was “kind of relieved.”

“I was a little afraid of something really nauseating,” she said.

The last time a titan arum, native to Sumatra, bloomed in New York was in 1939, garden officials said. Only a handful have flowered in the United States in the past few decades.

“It’s such a beautiful thing,” Fisher said of what he calls his “baby,” which was raised over 10 years from a tiny, 2-month-old tuber that came from a North Carolina nursery.

Resembling a freakishly appealing love child of a crenelated cabbage and a calla lily, the plant produces a bud each year before going dormant. Fisher said that a leaf reached 18 feet tall last summer.

But this year was its first flowering, noteworthy for the giant, phallic spadex that springs from the leaf, which grew as much as five inches a day.

Like many of nature’s most spectacular feats, the corpse flower’s blooming will be short-lived and the plant is expected to collapse in another day or two. But the garden’s experts have obtained pollen and will manually pollinate “baby.” If successful, that will produce seeds that will be distributed to other gardens.

First discovered in 1878 in western Sumatra, the plant, whose name means “deformed phallus,” was introduced into cultivation at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, in London in 1889. Because of its appearance, Victorian woman were kept from viewing it.

Have you ever heard of Bach Flowers? No, in this case we are not referring to the well know composer Johann Sebastian Bach, but to Eward Bach, an English physician and homeopath, who created his flower remedies in the early 1900s. He believed illness was caused by emotional imbalance and sought a new, natural healing method applicable to all. Jacqueline Young wrote this article for the BBC.

There are 38 flower remedies, which can be used individually or in combination and are usually taken as drops in water sipped throughout the day. Bach experimented with hundreds of flowers, trees, bushes and water sources before identifying 38 essences to remedy negative emotional states such as fear, guilt and anxiety.

The remedies were identified intuitively and produced by floating freshly picked flower heads in sunlit spring water or by boiling twigs in spring water. The essence of the plant was believed to leave an ‘imprint’ in the water. It was then mixed with a small portion of brandy as a preservative, and bottled.

Bach also formulated a combination Rescue Remedy for emergency treatment of panic and trauma, which is now also made as a cream.

Today the 38 flower remedies are sold worldwide. Many other flower and gem remedies (made by steeping the stone in spring water) have also been developed, including Australian bush remedies and Himalayan, Alaskan and desert remedies.

There’s little research evidence for the benefits of flower remedies, but effects are widely reported in their use for emotional, mental, spiritual and also physical problems.

The remedies can be combined with homeopathic or herbal remedies or conventional drugs. Exceptionally there may be an interaction effect - for example, arizona poppy can influence anticoagulant effects - or drug dosage may need to be altered. For a list of the Bach flower remedies and their applications, take a look at the A to Z of flower remedies