When I’m not out visiting gardens in bloom (which, decidedly, is most of the time since I am an incorrigible homebody), I like to bring home cut flowers I can enjoy at any time. I usually disperse a few varieties accordingly throughout the living spaces (something I picked up some years ago from a good friend)—a fun and punchy centerpiece to celebrate meals together at the dining table, fragrant romance for the nightstand. Recently, however, I started coveting Floret Flower Farm’s lushly stocked display shelves of ever-changing seasonal blooms on Instagram, and I realized that while I couldn’t replicate them (possessing no flower farm, garden, or even multiple empty shelves at the moment), I could clear one shelf and fill that with just a few small arrangements sourced from flower farms local to me!
It’s the easiest DIY decor project that immediately and repeatedly gives back: find gorgeous fresh flowers, plop in an assortment of repurposed vessels from around the house (mason jars and glass spice bottles for me), and place on a shelf now forever claimed “just for flowers.”
Funny to think that it’s the opposite of sprinkling blooms throughout the home, instead concentrating and therefore multiplying visual appeal in a single spot. For as long as I have enough flowers to do both, I shall! But in the event that I don’t, I like that I have options depending on whether I want to divvy up a haul and station flower friends at different posts or create a more focused “appreciation altar” to purposefully visit and refresh and just spend time sniffing and staring at first thing in the morning (also started just looking up at it whenever I have a small bit of downtime and feel the urge to scroll through the usual social media suspects—life-changing!).
While I always encourage following your heart’s desire and avoiding overthinking, I have a few tips for selecting flowers that will play happily together when grouped on a shelf. My current chorus includes cosmos, sweet peas, and Iceland poppies plucked quickly and on instinct at the farmer’s market. Only later when arranging them on the shelf did I find out that I did well to mix showy “power flowers” (fully opened Iceland poppies) with longer leafy stems (bushy cosmos) and windy smaller blooms (fluttery sweet peas).
I think the “bouquet test” can be helpful: while shopping, loosely bunch your picks together in one hand and go with what literally fits into place, paying attention to stem heights and whether blooms are colliding or making space for one another. Clustering the stems also helps with color, where you can easily see if it’s looking too monotone if you actually wanted a whimsical mix (I have plain white walls so a technicolor explosion always pops) or if you could choose a better complementary hue to what you already have.
And since you’ll ideally keep the arrangement around for as long as possible, you’ll also want to include a variety of blooming stages so you can behold a different show everyday! Sprucing up the flowers daily by cleaning up spent blooms and foliage, changing out the water, and giving the stems a fresh cut also naturally contribute to the subtle evolution of the display.
As for flower food, my farmer’s market haul didn’t come with any, and I kind of forgot about it, to be honest. Seeing the sweet peas start to drop around Day Three was a reminder that I will need to provide some additional sustenance in the future for prolonged enjoyment, but interestingly for this round I’ve just wanted to see for myself how long each type of bloom will last on their own (with the daily refreshment of water and stems). I even stopped photographing them after the first few days of bringing them home, just to let them (and myself) be. Call it an experiment in both detachment and staying in the moment. I know I won’t have these beauties forever, and for that I feel all the more fortunate for being able to savor them fully with this simple “flower shelf” while I still do.
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