5 Common Mistakes Amateurs Make When Arranging Flowers and 8 Ways to Fix Them

Nothing looks lovelier on a tabletop than fresh spring flowers. Farmers’s markets and garden centers are flush with color this time of year, but all those blooms can seem imposing when it comes to creating bouquets for your kitchen table.

Here are five common mistakes many non-professionals make — and bonus tips to really elevate your arrangements.

Common Mistakes

1. Too much color: The rainbow riot at the stand might have caught your eye, but at home, too much of a good thing can clash in a vase. Keep the twigs and textural variations to the pros. If you’re agonizing over blooms, you’re probably overdoing it.

“Like painting, or even like cooking, if you use too many ingredients, it confuses,” Eileen Johnson, the founder and creative director of FlowerSchool New York.

If you want more, think bigger instead of bolder.

“Instead of 10 tulips, get 30 tulips — put them in a vase, and it will always look great,” Johnson says.

Monochromatic blooms are offset by a pop of green. (Photo courtesy of Tom Sebenius)

2. Too short, too long stems:  Flowers that perch well above a vase lip leave too much room to fill, and can risk an arrangement looking overdone, or too empty, Johnson advises. As for length in the vase, there’s some competing advice: Cutting stems so they hit near the bottom will ensure they’ll drink as much as possible, even if you forget to refill. But shorter stems mean water takes less time to feed the blooms, so they might last longer. We’ll leave this one as a judgement call .

3. No Green: Natural hues — think chartreuse or lime — make floral colors pop. "Green is basically the background of all flowers,” says Tom Sebenius, who teaches floral arranging through the New York Botanical Garden in addition to running his own business, The Arrangement NYC. A simple arrangement of a variety of white flowers, with a few young, green hydrangeas, can take your arrangement to another level.

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4. Too Hot: Water temperature matters. Warm water encourages blooms to open faster — sometimes, in as much as a few hours. That also means their life cycle will end faster. Lukewarm water is better. Tulips, a common spring floral choice, prefer cold water. The right water temperature will encourage a slower bloom, so your flowers can last for days.

5. Toxic mix: Consider this a bonus tip, since it’s so specific: Don’t put tulips and daffodils in the same vase. “Daffodils actually have a toxin in them that releases into the water that makes the tulips die,”  Sebenius says.

Pro Tips:

The professionals we spoke with weren’t all about the negative. They offered some surprisingly easy tips to help your blooms look their best.

Stay Clean: Always use a clean vase and clean water. Bacteria in water can harm flowers more than any cut or temperature, so pluck all leaves beneath the water line and keep all fallen leaves out of the water, so they don’t start decomposing in the liquid.

Smashing open the bottom of the twig-like stem can help blooms soak up more water. (Photo courtesy of Tom Sebenius)

Light Source: Flowers need sunlight to grow, but in the house, they’ll orient toward the other lights sources too. “The sun encourages the flowers to open fully and therefore shortens their lifespan,” Sebenius says. Better to keep them in the shadows, and away from heat. Note where your light fixtures sit compared to your vases, Johnson says. You don’t want the stems to start bending toward a wall.

AAL: That’s Always Add Lilac. Lilacs work with almost every spring flower’s aesthetic. They fill a room with natural perfume that’s not overpowering, Sebenius says. They can make your whole room feel like spring.

Cut Right: When trimming stems, cut the tips at an angle. For roses, cut crosswise so there’s two angles at the end. For flowers with more branch-like stems, like lilacs or dogwoods, Sebenius recommends smashing the end with a hammer. The goal is to expose as much of the flower stem’s insides as possible to the liquid, to encourage the blooms to drink up.

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