30 centerpieces – quick! on a budget!

Shrubbery to the Rescue

As the school year comes to an end, a plethora of events come up, most needing food and flowers, and usually the budget is tight. Here is a quick, inexpensive idea for bringing garden cheer to your special celebrations.

When shopping for flowers, see what is in season and local (it is usually the least expensive). Also consider what will give you an adequate amount of volume and will fit into any set color scheme.

In this case, the school colors, green and blue needed to be featured. Thirty round tables needed to be decorated in a school gymnasium.

Daffodils from local fields were the least expensive flowers available, the blossoms are big and the yellow is a nice complement to the school colors. We bought 30 bunches of 10 daffodils.

Containers can be a major portion of the expense. These glasses are our standard summer party glasses, but serve nicely as vases as well. Oftentimes glasses cost less than vases, little french bistro glasses also work well. Canning jars can also make good vases.

To stretch your flower dollars start with greens. Greenery adds depth and texture to your arrangements and also provides a steady base for positioning the flower stems.

At Splendid Market, we keep several types of herbs and evergreen shrubs growing in our gardens because they work well in bouquets. For these bouquets we cut 45 stems each of Sage and Hebe. A combination of greens make for a more complex, interesting bouquet.

Gather 3 stems (of at least 2 types of greens) together and trim the ends at an angle to fit into the vases. Push the greens down into the vases, which have been filled 3/4 of the way full with water.

Once the greenery is in place, start adding the color. Hold the bunch of flowers loosely in one hand with the heads all at the same height, then trim the stems to fit in the vases. For easy clean-up trim ends directly into a basket.

Slide the flower stems into “holes” in the greenery. Place 5 stems around the perimeter of the arrangement and then use the other 5 stems to fill holes in the interior section of the bouquet.

When finished, pack the bouquets in trays or produce crates so they are ready to roll. If you want to speed up the blooming process keep them in a warm place, to delay blooming, keep them cool.

Now, for those school colors. Colorful squares of paper can help the centerpiece look more proportional in the center of a large table.

used a tissue paper from Thailand, in muted shades of blue and green, with nice fibre detail.

Using the metal side of a school ruler, score the line where you will tear, then flip over the paper and score on the other side.Then, holding one side of the paper firm with one hand, gently tear along the scored line. It’s okay if the edge is a little jagged or irregular. We tore 30 – 12″ x 12″ squares of each color.