With the longer days and the beautiful sunshine, my favourite colour palettes move from the subdued pinks, peaches, and blushes towards the vibrant tones of the hot pink, lime green, and orange.
There is no better way to start the celebration of summer off than with tropical flowers!
Sometimes people will tell me that they steer away from tropical flowers because they are intimidated by their shape or size. I say, take on the challenge and see what beauty you can create!
With changing off the water every couple of days and recutting of the stems, this arrangement lasted two weeks!
Do you want to create your very own tropical arrangement? Follow along with the steps below and you’ll have an amazing arrangement in no time!
Start off with a large clean vessel, sharp pruners and all the stems of your tropical flowers cleaned. Make sure that your vase is substantial enough for the size of your arrangement. You don’t want to create a beautiful arrangement that is too top heavy to last.
I prefer to design in freshwater than in floral foam for many reasons, number one, the floral foam doesn’t break down and isn’t environmentally friendly. If I was making this piece to be large for a stage, I would use a larger container and may decide to go solid in colour with chicken wire in the base to stabilize it. But since this is just for a side table in my home, this recycled glass jug will work perfectly.
Here are I started with the large sago palm frawn first. Because of the size of it, I cut the palm leaf and used both parts of it. Tip: Use a good pair of pruners so that you can cut through the thick woody stems of your tropical flowers.
I cut the smaller leaves off the bottom of the palm. You don’t want any of the leaves to be under the water which will grow bacteria and shorten the life of your floral arrangement.
I then cut one of the palms shorter than the other and crisscrossed the stem in the base of the vase, creating a V shape with the leaves.
I started off with three large pink queen protea, two that are solid pink and one with black tips. I cut the protea with black tips shorter and placed it at the front of the arrangement to be more of a focal point. I placed the other two protea at different heights and in a slight triangle shape. These flowers will be the largest in the arrangement, so I want to balance it out and separate them throughout the arrangement. If I placed all the protea together, the arrangement would look very heavy and lopsided.
I then added in the lime green spray leucadendron. I love the colour and texture that this flower brings to the arrangement and the longevity of the blooms.
Next up are the red ashima orchids. I used three again to balance out the arrangement. I love the pink tone to the red colour and how nicely it works with the pink protea.
I then added the lime green dendrobium orchids. With all the spikey texture in this arrangement, I was able to get away with two. If all the other flowers in the arrangement were cut low, than my two dendrobium orchids would look like rabbit ears or tv antennas, but I think here this works.
The last step is that I added touches of smaller greens to the base of the vase to bring the arrangement down a little. Some Italian ruscus and bear grass at the base was the finishing touch.