Create a Spectacular Large Floral Arrangement!

What's more summery than these beautiful luscious pastel colors? Hi, welcome to another video. Today we're going to make this spectacular arrangement in these to-die-for sherbet colors of apricot, pale parfait pink, white, and china blue. For those of you who are new to my channel, welcome. My name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a florist with over 30 years design experience doing weddings and events, and I share weekly floral inspiration with you. You ready to learn how to make this? Let's get started. So a few weeks ago, I had thousands and thousands of roses in the garden, and it was just an embarrassment of riches. It was just tons and tons of flowers that I can't even get to use all of them. And now we're out of bloom. It's that interval between when we have a lot of flowers and during that first flush of blooms and before the second crop comes in. I've deadheaded everything, been fertilizing, and I went out this morning and there's not that much growing. I have a few stems of yellow roses and a few stems of pink roses right now that I just cut this morning. And I thought, okay, I'm going to have to go buy some flowers to make a video. And instead of buying more roses, which is usually my go-to, as you know, I love roses of all kinds. I'm going to challenge myself, I thought, and use some flowers that I don't often use, that I don't love. So I said, okay, I don't love Gerbera daisies, but they had some really beautiful Sherbert colored Gerbera daisies at the flower mart, pale pink and pale apricot. And I thought, well, I will buy some of this and let's just play and incorporate it into a beautiful pastel summer arrangement. So that's what we're going to do today. Dahlias are also in season, so I just bought some of these beautiful white dahlias because they're incredibly healthy looking and I think they'll last pretty well for dahlias. So before we start, I really wanted to share with you a new product. It's actually not a new product, but it's kind of a new product to me. It's called Quick Dip. It's by Floralife. Now, this has been around for years, and honestly, I thought it was just kind of BS, you know, selling you more product. But I tried this and it is astonishing how well it works. So I wanted to share with you guys. It's called Quick Dip, and what you do is it comes in a bottle and it also comes in like a giant jug if you want to buy a big one. But you pour like about two inches of this in a jar. I put it in a jar so I can reuse it. And then you, after you cut your flowers, you dip it in this one to three seconds, and then you put it in the water or in your arrangement. And I have to say, I've been trying this for a few weeks now. It really, really makes all your flowers last so much longer. I wasn't a believer, but I'm a believer now. So what I do is just buy a little jar of some sort with a lid and pour about an inch or two inches of this Quick Dip in here. You can always reuse it. I mean, it's going to turn cloudy and not so pretty, but it's okay. You can reuse it. And what I do is I strain it. So if there's a little bits in there, you strain it out. You could just keep using this. So you don't need to just use it once and then throw all this away. And a bottle of this is not that expensive. I'll see if they sell this on Amazon. If it does, if they do sell on Amazon, then I will link it in the description below because this I bought at the flower market and this is 16 ounces for I think about $9. So yeah, I'm a believer. So I've been using this and it's made all the difference. Like I was cutting lavender and scabiosa and, um, Orlea, things I grow in the garden that sometimes wilt, but if you use a Quick Dip, they don't wilt. And I thought, well, we've got a lot of not very long lasting flowers like gerbera daisies, the heads like to droop and dahlias are notoriously not long lasting. So I thought this is great video to show you using Quick Dip. And I already process all the flowers with the Quick Dip. So what you do is you get a bunch of your gerberas or whatever, cut the stems like maybe an inch, dip it in here for one to three seconds, and then you can start arranging or put it in a bucket with water. Okay. And every time you make a fresh cut to use, then you want to do the Quick Dip. So just have that next to you as you're designing. And it's worked great for greenery as well. I had greenery last, like, I don't know, three weeks almost. So it's really, really an amazing product. I don't know what's in it, but whatever it is, it works. Okay. So I have an assortment of flowers here. I bought gerbera daisies, white dahlias. I have a few stems of roses from the garden, also some hydrangeas from the garden, all in pastel shades. And so we're going to first start with greening in. Now I'm using a cake server. It's a cake platter or a cake riser with a little bit of a reservoir for water. And I've got floral foam in here to fit to the shape of this container. I think I just used this in a previous video, and I'm starting to really like this container because it's basically like a neutral, large, wide pedestal, right? And I have all this greenery I cut from the garden. I'm going to start with a potassium. This is potassium that I grow. And I also have scented geranium. See, this I picked, I want to say 10 days ago, and I did the Quick Dip. It's still perfect. So it's really a wonderful product. I wouldn't recommend it to you guys if it didn't work. I'm glad I tried it. 30 years doing flowers and I never used it, and I can't believe how great it is. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and just, these are just some short pieces that I broke off from my scented geranium. So I'm going to go ahead and use these first. It's going to be a lot of greening in because as you see, there's a huge surface that we have to cover today, right? See, I cut the stem, Quick Dip, and then you can just insert into the foam. I can't wait to use this in the spring with like lilacs. I can never get lilacs to last. I mean, they're gorgeous when you buy them and you think, okay, this time they're going to last. No, they never last. They wilt in a couple of days. So I'm going to see if this Quick Dip works with lilacs in the spring. That'd be exciting. So I chose sort of light, pale green greens because we're doing this pastel-y arrangement. I just want all the colors to be like cheerful and bright and light and I don't know, just very romantic. The hydrangeas are great in the garden right now, but the roses are out of bloom. But the roses are coming back. I have a lot of new growth and buds. So hopefully in a couple more weeks, we'll have a new crop of flowers. It's not going to be as prolific as that first flush of blooms, but we'll have something. And I don't know about you. I am one who's not shy about picking from the garden. My mom sometimes didn't want to pick everything from the garden. She was like, oh, I want to stay, have it stay on the plant. But I am not. I go out there and I just mercilessly cut my roses to use in arrangements. Because honestly, out in the plants, rose bushes and, you know, a few stems more or less of roses in the garden doesn't make a huge difference. But when you make a beautiful arrangement for your home with your roses, I feel like that makes a huge impact in your house. So it's kind of worth sacrificing a few blooms from the garden to have that in your house. I'm always surprised around here. Most of my neighbors have, you know, pretty sizable gardens and a lot of them, they don't think to cut from the garden to use. That's one of the things I feature every week, you know, things that I grow in the garden that we use. So flower arrangements come from, flowers come from gardens, right? It could come from your garden. It doesn't have to come from a flower shop or Costco or Trader Joe's, right? You could grow your own flowers. Okay. So we've greened in quite a bit. I'm trying to think I should green a little bit more here. Yeah. And I always like to use an assortment of greenery for different textures, like some broader leaf greenery, like the cinder geranium, as well as a finer leaf greenery, like the potassium. Because when you have that variety of texture, sort of like when you plant a flower bed or a border, you want to have contrasting shapes and sizes of greenery within your arrangement. Okay. So I think that's pretty good. And that kind of sets how big our arrangement is going to be. It's going to be pretty big because the opening of this is so big, right? But I was thinking of a low cascading arrangements. We're not going to go much taller than this. I'm going to start with maybe some hydrangeas. I have beautiful Annabelle hydrangeas and some white hydrangeas from the garden. These are just regular white hydrangeas. I planted a couple of years ago. Quick dip in here and then in. Just kind of an assortment of hydrangeas. This really makes a big difference with hydrangeas. Now the Annabelle's are still pretty tender and usually I'm scared to cut them when they're just starting to bloom like this because they don't last. But with the quick dip, it does last. I cut this several days ago and it's still looking pretty good. Okay. With a square container, you have to make sure you're not making a square looking arrangement. So I don't want to do like four hydrangeas because I'll emphasize the squareness of your container. Okay. Let's start with some dahlias. Okay. Look at these beautiful white dahlias. So nice, right? They're just starting to bloom in my area. And so I'm seeing them at market and they're beautiful. And these kind of button type dahlias last a lot longer than the really gigantic dahlias. They're just kind of directional and the stems are really thick. So they're not the easiest flowers to arrange. So you want to just kind of put it in kind of sideways for it to show up nicely. It kind of depends on the stem and how it's growing. Look at how thick these stems are. They're hollow. We'll see how well this quick dip does with dahlias. That's another flower that's notoriously not long lasting. A couple of dahlias there. I usually take a lot of extra foliage off because I don't want the foliage to be sapping water from your blossoms. We could almost do an all white arrangement, huh? With the dahlias and the hydrangeas. That would be pretty in this white container. Okay. I'm going to add in my few stems of roses. I have a stem of golden celebration. I just have one stem, so I'm just going to really feature it. Okay. Right there. Then I have a few stems of this very pretty rose called the fawn. This rose has been a little bit neglected in my garden because it's on a hillside in the creek area. And I really need to go in there and shape it and clean it up. But it's quite a prolific little bloomer. It's just kind of nonstop. It's a landscape rose, meaning it kind of grows in a shrub. It has these small, old fashioned kind of flat blooms, which I think are kind of charming. I'm kind of putting it on the perimeter so that it really shows up because we don't have a lot of roses, right? We only have these few stems. So I want it to show up. It's called the fawn and I got it from heirloom roses, which is one of my favorite places to buy roses to plant in the garden because they don't graft their roses. Roses are all grown on their own root. And that means if you live in a very cold climate, you don't have to worry about ever losing your rose because it'll come back and it'll come back true to the rose that you purchased, not the rootstock. And I'm in a warm climate. We don't have the problem of roses dying from the cold, but we do have the problem that after a few years, the rootstock starts coming out. And it's very annoying. You've got in your garden, all these weird looking magenta single blooms that are not very pretty, not what you signed up for. And if you don't get ahead of it and start, you know, removing the rootstock, it could start taking over or sapping the energy from your rose that you purchased. So what they do is they graft the roses onto more vigorous rootstock. And the rootstock is usually not a beautiful rose. Mostly what I see is like a dark red magenta single rose, but it's very vigorous. And that's why they use it as the rootstock. Got some Gerberas here. Now I'm not a big fan of Gerbera daisies, but I thought the color is so beautiful on this that I think it would be charming in this arrangement because we're doing pastels. And I want to challenge myself to kind of go outside of my usual standbys like peonies and English roses and spray roses and use some different kinds of flowers. I feel like I need a smaller Gerbera to cascade out instead of this big one. These Gerberas are pretty nice. No drooping heads. Maybe because I use the Quick Dip. I like these smaller Gerberas. I don't like them when they're huge because they're even harder to use because they're so flat. I think that's what it is. It's kind of hard to use Gerberas because they're so flat and they're kind of directional. I thought that pale pink and white and this apricot-y color, kind of sherbet colors would be really pretty in an arrangement on a wet white pedestal. And Gerberas are readily available. I see them all the time at Trader Joe's. They don't often have really great colors, but they'll have like red and yellow, orange. These pastel-y colors are just really pretty, I think. There's so many different kinds. They have the frilly kind now, double Gerberas, bicolor Gerberas, all sorts. Okay, I'm gonna stand back and assess what we have. Looks pretty good. We still have some foam showing, but we've got tons of greenery and other things that we can use. I also cut some smaller heads of the Annabelle Hydrangea. I'm thinking of using it almost like a filler flower, like Queen Anne's Lace, because my Annabelle's, the heads are so huge. They're like this big around like a dinner plate, most of them. But we do have some of these smaller ones that are so lacy and pretty. And before using Quick Dip, I'd be hesitant to cut something like this. But now with the Quick Dip, I think that vase can last. I even cut like a green one, pale green one. I also have been growing Love and Mist. Love and Mist is a pretty little cottage-looking flower that has like little white and blue star-shaped flowers. But the great thing is once the flowers are gone, you've got the seed pods. These are beautiful, aren't they? Kind of frilly. So we're gonna use this Love and Mist seed pod in here as like a texture filler in a pale green. These will self-sow in your garden. I think I planted seeds one year and they self-sow the next year and now it's prolific. It's all over the place. And they're very easy. Now the blooming time is sort of short, but you're left with these beautiful seed pods. So then, you know, you can cut it to use the flowers, but you can also cut the seed pods to use. And leave some though so that they can self-propagate, self-sow for next year. So it's an extra step to do the Quick Dip, but it's definitely worth it. Where do I need another piece of this? Maybe here. Okay. Now I also have some Chamomile, the Fever Few, just I thought it's pretty. It's a little daisy shape, sort of like a, sort of repeats the look of the Gerbera Daisies. They're kind of neutral and they've got that little yellow center and white. I thought it'd be very pretty in here. So I'm just going to put a little in here. Oh, that's so sweet. I used to grow the Chamomile. I should grow it again. The foliage was really beautiful too. It was light green and kind of clustered, but my Chamomile, they didn't grow this long. You know, the stems are kind of short. So it wasn't that easy to use in flower arrangements. And it's so inexpensive. These I bought from Trader Joe's, I think $4.99 for a bunch. So I guess I don't have to grow it, right? I have one more novelty plant material I'm going to show you in a minute that we're growing. Let's go ahead and add this in first. The Chamomile, the little heads like to break. They like to bend sometimes. So that's the kind of thing you have to watch out for. When you're processing or pulling them out, they'll be damaged very easily. The little heads are very delicate. They also have a double version of this without the yellow center. So it looks like little tiny sprigs of mums, which is really cute too. Summery cottagey flowers, just picking the little broken heads off. I think this one has too many broken heads. Oh, well, let's try to salvage it. When I'm doing event work, this really slows you down. Having to process little filler flowers that, you know, have like little broken heads that you have to clean up. So you watch out for that if you're doing multiples. But if you're doing one arrangement, you can kind of take your time and, you know, clean up things like that. So there's no real plan. Just wanted a really pretty arrangement that has all these beautiful pastel-y colors. Just happy and cheerful, light and airy looking. And it's kind of different from all sides. We've got a lot of peach gerberas on this side. We've got the pink roses and dahlias on this side. And we've got, you know, so it's all kind of different. And we only have one sprig of the yellow rose on this side, but I think it all works because the colors are all soft and delicate. So I think it works even though they're all kind of different. And you know how I like things that are just kind of different and doesn't have to be like perfectly even. I don't love arrangements where you've got a perfect number of gerberas all spread out perfectly. I just like it kind of hodgepodge-y. But overall, there's a cohesive design without it being, you know, oh, we've got to have a peach, peach gerbera here, peach gerbera here, pink here, pink here, you know, all perfect. Now, the novelty plant material I'm going to show you next is Australian Bluebell Creeper. This is a drought-tolerant landscape bush that blooms in early summer, late spring. And look how beautiful that is. I don't know if you can see the little tiny bells, but I can. They're like little periwinkle blue bells. And I thought this would be very nice cascading out of this container. Now, it's kind of an unruly vining shrub. It's not that beautiful in the landscape. It's kind of like a tangled mess. But look at these gorgeous tendrils. I had to use this. So there's a nice vining tendril here that we're definitely going to take advantage of and have this cascading out of our arrangement. OK. And then, you know, that's the thing with these free-forming, free-form type of plant materials. You kind of have to work with what what nature gave us, right? OK. So that's what we have right here, like a tendril and a little repeat here. Then I'm going to cut. Let's see if I have another tendril-y piece here. Yes, I do. There's this one right here. That kind of tendril-y pieces. I'm going to cut this because I think it's too unruly to use as one big stem. I'm going to go ahead and have that cascade out here. So we've got a cascading out here and there. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just kind of work with what you have. That's another thing you can grow in your garden. It's called Australian Bluebell Creeper. I don't know how cold hardy it is because I'm in a very warm climate here. So those of you who are who are in a colder climate, I'm not sure how hardy it is. I believe it may be hardy down to like 25 degrees or something like that. So not too hardy. But in California, definitely, you know, easy to grow, drought tolerant, very special material. I've been cascading from several vantage points. Then I always like to weave a little throughout the arrangement so it doesn't look like it came from nothing. Right. But you guys have to stop me if I go too overboard with this material. Sometimes I get like that. There's a new novelty material and I just want to use it everywhere. So here's a nice tendril-y piece. That's the thing with these like crazy materials is that it's a lot of processing you have to do. Okay. Just adding it to this cluster here so it could cascade out more. It's like a softer cascade. Now this in our climate in California will be drought tolerant once it's established. But it'll look, of course, better if you water it regularly. But it seems like it's a really tough plant with woody, viney stems. Okay. Okay. So we've got like little bluebells going throughout the arrangement. Just going to check to see if we have any foam showing through the cover. Yeah, there's a little bit showing here. These broader leaves cut short are great for covering foam. If you cut this short and you put it here, it covers your exposed foam quickly. Scented Geranium is one greenery that I always grow a variety of. It's really easy to grow and so many ways to use it. It smells beautiful. Okay. I'm going to stand back and assess. Sometimes you have to edit yourself a little bit. I have to see if I put too many of the frilly elements in here because sometimes when you do that, it actually makes your arrangement look less full, even though it's bigger. It's like weedier, if that makes sense. So I might go in and add a few more Gerbera Daisies. Now that we've added all these filler flowers, just to make it look a little fuller, maybe another pink one here. Oh, forgot to do the quick dip. Okay. I'd like to add another Dahlia in here, but the Dahlia stems are so huge. Maybe I can get one in there. These Dahlias, you know, with thick stems, probably better in an arrangement where there's no foam, where we're just using it in a vase, but we committed to this design. So it is what it is. Add another Dahlia in here so that, you know, it kind of counterbalances all these frilly things that we've added in. Don't think there's space for one more Dahlia. I forgot. We have a few stems of Nico Blue Hydrangeas. Might as well add that in there because I think that it will kind of enhance the blue bellflowers. So I'm just going to add a few in here. This is the first hydrangea I grew in my garden called Nico Blue. Those of you who've been gardening for a while will know it. One of the older blue hydrangeas. Beautiful China Blue color. Love it. Where can I add this stem? It's almost like we don't have space. I was going to maybe stick it in here. You know what? I'm going to shorten it a little bit and set it a little bit deeper in here so that it's next to the white Dahlias and setting all the white Dahlias. There we go. A pop of blue. So we're all done. This turned out beautiful, pastel-y, romantic, so expressive of summer. And it's kind of different from each side. And I kind of like that. It doesn't have to be always the same. It's much more interesting if each side is a little bit different, but you still have a cohesive design. And I challenged myself to use Gerbera Daisies, which I usually don't like, but these colors really seduced me. These sherbet-y colors. I hope you enjoyed this video today. If you're new to my channel, thanks for watching this video. Please like and subscribe and click the little bell to be notified when I put out a new video because I do share weekly floral inspirations. And those of you who watch me every week and leave me such kind, sweet comments, you know I love you guys and love to hear what you're doing this week. So please leave me a comment to say hi. I'm really going to enjoy this cheerful, pastel arrangement in my home this week. I hope you're inspired to go out there and create something beautiful. Flowers are nature's little luxury. Go out there and buy some flowers, pick some flowers, and make something gorgeous. And I will see you in my next video.