Pretty Up Your Grocery Store Flowers

I’m just popping in quickly today to share some tips on prettying-up your grocery store bouquet. You know the ones- you walk into the store with your list in hand, you’re going to leave with nothing that’s not on that list. But then you see the beautiful bouquets to your left, so you decide to take a peek, and they’re on sale! You can’t say no- am I right? Then you get those beauties home and plop them in your vase to find that they’re not quite as cute as they were in their paper wrap. Why!? I do this all the time- and this is the reason I started playing around with arranging flowers. They’re the bouquets you get as gifts too- the one in these photos is from one of my friends when she visited our new place for her first time (how sweet is that?!). So here’s what they looked like just plopped into a vase. The flowers are pretty, but the vase is doing nothing for them.

I’ve mentioned before that I love getting flowers- like it makes my week and I tell everyone that sees them that they were a gift with a goofy big grin. So don’t think I’m writing this because I don’t appreciate them… I do, so much that I trim them and arrange them to best show them off. Okay? Good.

So here’s what I do to pretty up my grocery store flowers! First, you’ve got to see what you’ve got in there! Pull that bouquet apart and lay it all out.

This bouquet had mums (the pinky purple ones) as the main flower. Almost every grocery bouquet is going to have a spray flower like mums or daisies- this basically means there’s more than one bloom on a stem. Flowers are generally bought wholesale by the stem so it’s a cost effective way to buff up the bouquet. I cut these to height first and used them to start my arrangement from.

Next I added the mini white carnations and the pink gerbera daisies. Trying to distribute the colours evenly. It helps to pick the front of the arrangement before you start adding too many blooms. This helps you decide where to place the flowers to get the best view. The last flower I added was the tall purple ones. Thank you Lynn for putting a name to these beauties! The purple flowers are statice. I love these because they add height to the arrangement so it’s not just one big flat ball of flowers. I cut them a tiny bit taller so they’d stick out the top.

Last, I added in the greenery. You might have noticed I tossed the tropical looking palm-like leaves. I’m not sure why they put those in every grocery bouquet but unless they’re tropical looking flowers, I’m not into it. Maybe it’s just me and the rest of the world loves them… do you? Anyways, since you’ve chosen the front of your bouquet, you can tuck the leaves in around the sides and back to frame your arrangement. I like this tall little stack of leaves they included- so I added it in off center. There’s a couple ‘rules’ of floral arranging and one of them is to avoid even numbers and such- notice how they include three daisies instead of two? I try to stick to keeping it ‘uneven’ and tend not to center things that will stand out (like that stack of leaves).

So that’s pretty much it! Doesn’t it look a world of better? So I failed to realize (until writing this) that I took next to no process shots and didn’t even show you the vase I chose until the very end! Doh. Next time I’ll try to do better guys, I promise. The ‘vase’ I chose is actually an apothecary jar with no lid. It’s one of the ones we used for candy at this party. Use what you have, right?

Do you have any tricks to make your grocery store bouquets look a little more special? I’d love to hear!