TUTORIAL: STYLING WITH BUD VASES + Physalis

Styling with Black Baccara Roses, Spray Roses, Queen Anne's Lace, Sand Cherry Foliage, and Physalis

It’s flower time, and this week's Botany Bundle has a sweet mix of deep burgundy roses, peach spray roses with summer fillers and foliage. We're going to deconstruct the Botany Bundle to style these stems loosely into bud vases; creating a sweet and simple still-life with fruit.

Flower Profiles

Black Baccara Roses
Though not black, but a deep red, the Black Baccara rose bears dark velvety petals with black edges. With contradictory meanings attributed to the Black Baccara, and black roses in general, their symbolism is in the mind of the beholder.

Peach Spray Roses
These blooms are perfect or as a complimentary flower. Spray roses generally have the same physical characteristics as traditional roses, but they are smaller in size and have multiple blooms per stem. The soft peach hue in a rose is fast gaining in popularity, and is now widely loved by many. Its meaning in the language of flowers is modesty.

Queen Anne's Lace
This dainty filler flower is an uncultivated form of the wild carrot, with broad round heads of tiny white flowers that resemble lace. What's behind its name? It is said that while Queen Anne was making lace by hand, she pricked her finger and out came a single drop of blood. The drop fell on the lace resembling the dark centre you'll often find at the centre of wild Queen Anne's lace.

Sand Cherry Foliage

Dramatic greenery. Purple leaf sand cherry (Prunus x cistena) is a hardy shrub that belongs to the rose family. This striking plant is valued for its reddish-purple foliage.

Physalis
Physalis is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family, which grow in warm temperate and subtropical regions of the world. Nightshade has strong symbolism of falsehood in the language of flowers.

Here’s what you’ll need:

3x stems of Black Baccara roses
1-2x stems of peach spray roses
2-3x stems of Queen Anne's lace
2x Sand Cherry branches
1x box Physalis or smaller figs, plums, or mandarins
3x clean glass bud vase
sharp scissors or flower shears

Instructions

Fill the clean bud vases with water. Trim the Sand Cherry branches to a shorter length and pop these stems into three separate bud vases. Add more stems to wider mouth bud vases than your narrower bud vases. Make sure there are no leaves touching or emerged under water.

Trim your Black Baccara roses at slightly different heights. The first stem short enough to rest on the lip of your smallest or shortest bud vase. Trim the second stem slightly taller and pop into second bud vase. Trim, but leave the third stem longer and place it in the final and tallest bud vase. We are stepping our focal flowers.

Trim and insert the peach spray rose stems into empty spots in two of the bud vases, leaving the smallest bud vase without this stem.

Trim your stems of Queen Anne's lace at varying heights - keeping these stems taller. Insert at various angles. This gives your arrangement movement and an ethereal feel.

When photographing, move your bud vases back and forth and forward and back, filling in empty spaces. Lay discarded Sand Cherry leaves, found objects, and fruit such as Physalis at the base of your bud vases. Move these objects around, trying to create an effortless placement. Hang a mesh bag or piece of art in a portion of the back ground to create another layer in your still-life.

Tip: Photograph your still-life using natural diffused light.

You're done - Enjoy!