Are you doing any last-minute decorating for the holidays? A floral arrangement with lots of traditional greens and red tulips is a great way to quickly dress up your space before guests arrive! Read on to learn how to make this gorgeous holiday tulip bouquet.
Creating a Holiday Tulip Bouquet
This arrangement is actually something I threw together last Christmas because my giant kitchen island felt rather barren of holiday spirit, especially considering that I’d gone through so many other efforts to quickly and affordably (see my Mini-Christmas Wreaths post) deck the rest of the halls in the house. A floral arrangement is an easy, fast, and sophisticated addition to Christmas décor.
Now, normally we see things like poinsettias, amaryllis, red and white roses or carnations, accented with lots of evergreen trimmings like fir, cedar, pine, and holly! These are all very pretty, and can be combined with a number of other things to create a great holiday bouquet, but I really wanted to put the focus on a different type of flower that we don’t normally associate with Christmas.
I ended up picking tulips because they are really easy to work with and also don’t need to be the focal point of an arrangement to make it really special. This let me make the evergreen branches and the twigs that dropped from some of my fruit trees in my yard take the focus of the arrangement, while still allowing it to feel very wintery and Christmas-y without using tons of red and white in the bouquet as well.
How to Make the Holiday Tulip Bouquet
Materials:
- 5 to 6 red tulips
- 2 stems of red/pink dianthus
- 3 to 4 stems of red hypericum berries
- 3 to 4 evergreen branches (I used fir and cedar)
- 1 large sprays of rosemary
- 2 sprays of sea holly
- a large vase or pitcher filled with fresh cold water
- Floral or Kitchen Shears
Instructions:
- Start by trimming the evergreens to different lengths and placing them so they drape and spill out of the front right side of the vessel.
- To balance the drama of the evergreens spilling out the front right, trim the rosemary spray and the sea thistle stems so they spring out of the vase to the back left of the arrangement
- Fill the front of middle of the vase with the hypericum berries and dianthus stems.
- Next trim and place the tulips so they cascade up over the evergreens on the right side of the vase.
- Lastly, to finish the arrangement, carefully trim and place the bare twigs so that they reach out to the left front of the arrangement, under the hypericum and dianthus. This may seem like something you want to do before you place the hypericum or dianthus, but since this item does not need water and is more of a sculptural element in the arrangement, I decided to wait to do this last so I could make sure it’s placement and size balanced the rest of the live florals that need the access to the water.
- Fill the vessel up with more cool water for the flowers to drink up and place out with your other holiday decorations!
BONUS CUTE CENTERPIECE FLORAL!!!
Ok so, because I don’t have the garden I did at my old house right now, nor is there a local farmer’s market for me to peruse this time of year, I buy a lot of my flowers from either Safeway or Haggen since both are close to my house and I can usually get some good flowers between some of the premade bouquets and their individual floral bundles.
The cedar and hypericum were part of the same holiday evergreen bunch I picked up at the store as a bunch of eucalyptus, which I love the smell of, but wasn’t interested in using in my main bouquet arrangement. I also had some fir branches left over from a walk through the park after a windstorm, so I had lots of things for making more holiday arrangements. I had a couple extra tulips as well, so I trimmed them and threw them in a little green vase, then wrapped the fir branches with a beaded garland I had and voila! Instant cute little centerpiece, I didn’t even have any plans on having.
Love things like this for creating extra little floral moments through the house.
How to keep your floral alive for longer!
Here are some quick tips to keep your floral arrangement looking good for longer:
- Check the water level frequently and add more as required to keep the stems below the water level
- If the water starts looking cloudy or smells funky, pull your flowers out and put them in a spare vase or vessel while you completely wash their old vessel and change out the water entirely.
- Whenever you do a water change or if the floral is drying despite the water being fresh and clean, trim the stem back another inch or so and replace in the water. Sometimes more of the stem is dead than we think when we are cutting and prepping flowers so we need to trim it back further as time goes on.