Today I’m sharing an arrangement tutorial for a style that was quite popular at the Team Flower Workshop: horizontal, reaching, and packed with locally grown flowers! Do you ever design with fresh farm flowers? Farm flower floral design is a great way to grow your creativity (especially when you include some surprising elements)!

In this video you’ll meet my good friend Kathleen who grows cut flowers in Thousand Islands, New York, right there next to the Canadian border.  Kathleen created a class called Foundations for Growing Cut Flowers that is 100% perfect for someone who would like to start growing cut flowers on a small scale (like me) or a more robust scale (like Kathleen). This class is also a perfect prerequisite for our other growing classes.  

In this tutorial, I’m using Apples of Peru, love-lies-bleeding (amaranth), chantilly snapdragons, foxtail grass, a farm weed, zinnas, rose strawflower, pincushion flower, and one nicotiana—to create a farm-fresh arrangement all from Kathleen’s garden. 

I begin by establishing the shape and size of the arrangement. For this one, I’ve used a vintage calendar photo as my inspiration, noting the roughly square shape of the design in such pictures. Using a flower frog allows for the sculptural shape and for fewer ingredients to stay right where they are initially placed. 

Key Points:

1. Build up (and just slightly out) with greens/grasses to evoke a straight, “growing” gesture.

2. Create depth by blending in smaller, more oblong blooms in higher up and further back.

3. Nestle larger-faced blooms in low and toward the front for visual balance.