Step Five:

You’re ready to start adding your filler flowers, but keep in mind that you might need to shift the whole bunch around in the vase to make room for them first. That’s cool. Your arrangement will go through phases and need mucho adjusting as you add stuff. Shift your greens as necessary to build a visually pleasing base before you start placing filler blooms, which you can also move around, add more of, and take away as you go. If you’re using a wide-mouthed container but want to keep your arrangement sparse-looking, you could try this super-neat scotch tape trick that I couldn’t do because I forgot I was out of tape and decided to play with flowers rather than walk to the store. It will help keep your greens and filler flowers at beautiful angles, and eventually help heavier blooms stay upright.

Step Six:

Now it’s time to start adding your second-tier flowers. Florists often suggest adding second-tier blooms to arrangements in odd numbers because they’re aesthetically pleasing (lots of disciplines, including photography and feng shui share these thoughts on odd numbers). Because I had tulips in so many random colors, I picked the pink and white ones:

There just so happened to be three of them (even though you can only see two in this pic). I trimmed the stems so they’d be different heights, and worked with their droopiness instead of against it, positioning them at angles that would help them flop gracefully in between the greens. As with all flowers, adjust until they look exactly how you want.

Step Seven:

Kapow, fireworks, volcanoes, bananas flambé, a pop star landing on stage in a helicopter: Here are your face flowers, the stars of the show. Place them in a striking spot amongst your more delicate blooms and listen to the entire arrangement hum in sweet harmony. I chose to place my hydrangeas smack in the middle of my arrangement because, well, they’re kind of made to be in the middle, standing tall and proud in their ridiculousness. (And yes, I broke the “rule of odd numbers.” Rules are made to be broken. Rules suck.)

Walk around the arrangement in a circle, making sure it looks full and interesting from every angle—flowers spaced in a way that looks good to you, no branches sticking out at boner-ific angles, no giant gaps. Shift greens and filler flowers around to create a better frame around the bigger blooms. Add, take away, futz and futz again.

In wild arrangements like these, you can be a little imprecise. I mentioned this before, but don’t be afraid to cut some stems shorter and some longer in order to shake things up. I lopped a tad too much off the end of one of the hydrangeas, but I like the fact that it isn’t perfect by technical standards. I mean, I don’t really think hydrangeas are aware of the fact that they look like giant, self-important dandelions. It’s OK to take ’em down a peg.

Provided everything looks great to you, you’re all done! Instagram the snot out of your gorgeous handiwork, then gather whatever flowers you have left over to make a bouquet.

How to make a bouquet:

From the files of “waste not, want not,” I always split up any extra flowers I have left over from a vase arrangement into a few small bouquets for friends. Nothing beats the joy of randomly surprising someone with a fistful of weird tulips. Try it some time! Contrary to what The Man would have you believe, flowers don’t require a special occasion like a birthday or date. If you’ve got some laying around, share the joy.

Step One:

First, lay some of your greens out flat to build a foundation for your bouquet.

Step Two:

Cut a handful of filler flowers—again, at different heights to add variety—and layer them over your greens in a fan shape, which will add stability and structure to your bouquet.

Step Three:

Working with the rule that odd numbers of things look pretty, I decided to use three blooms—two of the paler tulips and that giant, honking garden rose. The goal with a bouquet like this is for it to look nice all bundled up, and to contain enough flowers to fill a small vase when its recipient unwraps it. Little, special things are cute—just enough to be like, “Hi, congratulations on crushing that final exam/getting the lead in the musical/it’s Thursday and you’re my friend so here, have these flowers.”

Step Four:

At this point, I also realized I should have been building this bouquet on the butcher paper I got at the flower shop. Don’t throw anything away, ever. You can repurpose almost everything…

…like, for instance, the raffia from that same flower shop! Roll the paper around the bouquet, scrunch it up tight at the bottom where your bow will be, and tie it off. Ooh, how rustic.

Et voila! You’ve got yourself one beautiful bouquet. Take a deep breath, raise your right hand just over your left shoulder, and pat yourself on the back. Good job, dude.

But wait: You still have soooo many flowers left over.

Not a lot of flowers, but sometimes it’s cool to keep things really simple! I grabbed a variety of sprigs and cuttings from those smelly branches and bundled them up with all the bright tulips that didn’t work in my other arrangements. Wrapped up in butcher paper and tied with string, these look as clean and funny-elegant as a Warhol painting.

So there you have it: one giant arrangement and two cute bouquets that look way radder than run-of-the-mill supermarket arrangements, made with flowers you can find pretty much anywhere. Feel free to experiment with fake flowers, stuff you’ve scavenged from the yard, and any variety of vases, papers, and ribbons. When your bouquets finally drop dead, try tying them off in a bundle and hanging them upside down to dry. Then you can use them in all sorts of amazing decorative projects.

I hope arranging flowers, plants, and weeds brings you confidence and joy, and helps bring natural beauty into your life! ♦