Video: How to Make a Chuppah
Our friend Fuschia of Fuschia Moss Floral Design is here to help show us how to make a chuppah. See how we used a bale of Southern smilax and late summer forsythia foliage to create a base and a very small amount of Oasis and chicken wire to provide support and nourishment for the flowers.
The flowers we use include beautiful limelight and conical hydrangea grown by Shady Grove Gardens (a local farm in Boone, North Carolina), white wedding spirit roses, Cafe au Lait dahlias, pink snowberry, carnations, quicksand roses, and white viviane spray roses.
Heather Payne Photography
Key Points:
Get creative when sourcing a structure for something like a chuppah—either a local construction contractor friend or even your neighborhood garden center might be able to help you design a reusable, easy-to-assemble frame or suggest materials and techniques for customizing your own.
To make coverage of such a large piece of real estate more approachable, create bundles of greenery (or whatever material you are using), and attach them in overlapping formations using zip-ties. This is important to accomplish level one of the designing process.
When choosing ingredients for a large installation, remember that leathery-leaf greenery that holds well out of water works best! A few examples that work especially well include forsythia, smilax, lemon leaf, and ruscus.
For an install that already incorporates smilax, you can manipulate the smilax into coils as you go to create a sort of natural chicken-wire structure for your flowers to fall into later!
Add accent blooms to a chicken-wire-covered Oasis mechanic attached wherever you want emphasis. Try using some longer stems or vine tendrils that will extend out from the frame in order to achieve depth and proportion on a structure of such a large scale.
