Supporting Flower Arrangements

Before you start cutting your flowers, you'll need a container and a support system for them. If you have flowers with short or fragile stems, you may want to add a longer stem before you use it in your arrangement.

Containers

You can make your own if you want to and decorate it to suit the theme of your arrangement. Choose a clean tin can or glass jar that's big enough for your arrangement. Make sure it's in proportion to your arrangement. Decorate it with paint, cloth, stickers, or anything else that will enhance your arrangement and its theme.

Attach twigs, rope, seashells, or pasta shapes to your container using a glue gun.

Be careful: glue guns get very hot, and they heat metal and glass quickly too.

Support Systems

A good support system will hold the flowers in place and allow the cut end of their stems to reach water. There are several ways to do both with supplies available from most garden or craft stores:

Frog is a plastic or metal flower stem holder that fits into the bottom of a narrow container. It will keep the flowers in place and allows them to reach the water. If your container is very large, you can make a large frog from a ball of lightweight chicken wire. Leave longer stems on your flowers to pass through the holes to the water at the bottom.

• Oasis is one of the best materials for anchoring plants in any shape of container.
• It's also inexpensive and available at most florists' shops, craft stores, and gardening centers.

It's lightweight, green porous foam that holds water well. If you are using dried flowers, you can buy brown oasis. It doesn't hold water, so don't get them mixed up. Oasis can be cut into almost any shape using a sharp knife, but you may need to cut some extra wedges to slide down the sides of the container to ensure a snug fit. Soak the oasis in water before you use it to reduce the amount of air that will come in contact with the stem of your flowers. You can reuse oasis many times if you let it dry out completely between uses. Don't squeeze or wring it out or it will stay crushed and not recover its shape.

Adding Longer Stems to Flowers

You can add a longer, sturdier stem to a short-stemmed flower using florist's wire and tape. These are available at most craft and garden stores. The tape comes in green or white. It is stretchy and sticks to itself.

Cut a piece of florist's wire the length you want the stem of the flower to be. Place it beside the flower's real stem. Starting right up tight under the head of the flower, wrap the stem and wire together with a length of florist's tape. Turn the wire and stem slowly as you wrap the tape all the way down to the end of the wire. Cut the tape and wire off in a point at the end. This will make it easier to push the flower into the oasis for your arrangements.

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Kids' Valley Garden by Louise Larabie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.