The last of the Winter flower Camellias are still on the tree in the floral design garden and it is a shame these magnificent flowers aren't used more often...but there is a trick to making them last over a week without their heads falling off.
All you need is two small pins!Turn the Camellia flower upside down and carefully hold the bloom in the palm of your hand with your thumb and forefinger gripping the calyx. Push the two pins into the calyx, to form a cross.
Secure the head of a Camellia
The pins hold all the petals in place and do the job of the calyx as it dries out. Magic! The only time this won't work is when the Camellia bloom is fully open and about to drop its petals anyway... so pick them right up until they have reached that full bloom.
And how did I know many arrangers didn't know this trick? Because the other day I took some members of the Morrinsville Floral Art Club through a few of the flower arranging styles that are typically French and many brought garden grown Camellias.
A French classic created with Camellias
And this magnificent arrangement is what one of the groups created. It is mainly Camellias ranging in size from the truly enormous red ones to the tiny pink varieties where the French would use Roses, Carnations, Lizianthus etc as you can see in the exhibition in Versailles, near Paris covered in the July edition of floral design magazine.
So would you like to see how these Morrinsville Club members made their version of a French classic? Or better still, take the method and have a go yourself!
Secure the large floral sphere
Roll a large ball of floral foam in a tray of water so the outside is soaked up to 3cm deep. Don't soak it fully as it will be too heavy to lift and there is no need as you are using short stemmed flowers.
Fill an urn 1/3 full with old floral foam. Push 4 skewers into the sphere and push it all into the old floral foam in the urn. This will secure the sphere snuggly into the urn. Now sort the flowers you have into sizes, from the largest to the smallest.
Add the biggest flower first
Place the largest Camellias in first, all over the sphere in a random way (after pinning the calyx on each one of course). Don't group them just put them all over the place.
Now add the next sized Camelliasplacing them in the gaps and putting 2 or 3 together in small groups. This is still random, you are not making a pattern.
You can see the Club members used two different varieties of Camellias for this stage but both were in the red colourings.
Fill in the gaps with even smaller flowers
The same size but in a complementary colour, they added other small groupings of Winter Roses (Hellebores) and finally filled in any remaining gaps with the smallest pnk and red flowers they had, which you can see in the finished result further up on this page.
keep the flowers very close together,
keep them all even in height when placing them in the sphere so you end up with a huge flowery ball in an urn, and
only use tiny bits of foliage if you must, to fill in very small gaps.
Like it? So did they! In fact they were smiling all afternoon. But do go to the July edition of floral design to see it done in France, by the French as you will see not just this but many more sensational styles too.
