Spring floral arrangement: saying goodbye to tulips

Spring is well underway and sadly, tulip season is coming to an end. The Keukenhof is closed for this year after receiving over one million visitors! Have you ever visited? I still haven’t! I’ll put it on my to-do list for next year. To say goodbye to the tulips, I am sharing a spring floral arrangement, featuring tulips, hellebores and clematis. 

I made this spring floral arrangement with two of my garden favourites, hellebores and clematis, to create a fresh from the garden feel. The pretty soft pink tulips are store-bought.

No tulips in my garden

Last year, I had a serious case of tulip mania. I bought lots of tulips at the flower market and took a lot of pictures. Have a look at the colourful display of tulips at the flower market in this blog post. I didn’t buy that many tulips this year. I didn’t fell out of love with them, I will always love tulips! It’s just that there are so many other flowers to choose from.

This year I fell in love with daffodils. I planted daffodil bulbs in the garden last autumn and was really pleased with the result. The allium bulbs I planted are flowering at the moment and nothing is eating it, whoopee! Slugs and snails don’t like garlic and onions and alliums are ornamental onions.

I don’t have any tulip bulbs in the garden. Unlike daffodil bulbs, they will not bloom again next year. Avid gardeners plant new bulbs every year but I am a lazy gardener.

Spring floral arrangement recipe

I was inspired by The Flower Recipe Book to make a tulip and anemone spring arrangement a couple of weeks ago.  You can find it here. I used the ‘tulip recipe’ to make that bouquet, so for this blog post, I was looking for another recipe to recreate. The ‘hellebore recipe’ in the Flower Recipe Book is made with hellebore and tulips so I decided to use that recipe. I made some adjustments to the recipe. Instead of using olive branches (where can you find olive branches in May in Holland?) I used clematis montana and instead of mock orange, I used weigela from the garden. Weigela is a spring-blooming shrub. Mine has small, trumpet-like flowers.

In what’s blooming in the garden: May I wrote about the clematis in my garden, and how much I looked forward to using it in an arrangement. But when I tried to cut off a few stems of my clematis montana it turned out to be quite a difficult task. The stems of the clematis intertwine with each other and aren’t easily separated. When you buy clematis as a cut flower, you will find 10 perfect stems in a bunch, all the same length. How do flower growers do that?

I had a tough time making this arrangement. The weigela blooms kept falling from the branches while I was arranging the flowers in the vase. It’s not as easy as it looks! That’s the reason I didn’t take the step-by-step pictures. You just have to follow the instructions.

Ingredients

Ingredients for this spring floral arrangement:

• 2 or 3 branches of weigela or another flowering shrub
• 5 stems of hellebore
• 2 stems of clematis
• 5 stems of tulips

1. Choose a tall vase with clean lines that will emphasise the height of the arrangement. I chose a green glass vase.
2. Trim the stems of the weigela so that their height is twice that of the vase, letting them lean to the left side.
3. Trim the stems of hellebore and add them to the front and right side of the vase, allowing some of the blooms to hang down over the rim.
4. Trim the clematis stems and add one toward the back centre of the arrangement. Place the remaining stems in the lower right side of the vase so that it arcs out to the right.
5. Trim and add three tulips to the centre and right side, resting the blooms just above the rim. Trim and add the remaining tulip stems so that it’s slightly higher than the others on the right side.

If you enjoyed this spring floral arrangement, why not try it for yourself?