Power Flowers: 6 Unique Floral Designs

When Nicholas Apps, director of special programming and events at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, throws a party, he knows who to call to make it superb. So, too, the directors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and other well-known institutions. We asked for their favorite floral designers and made our own calls. They created six arrangements for the home, exclusively for Garden Design.

Stark, whose clients include Rachael Ray, Tiffany & Co., and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, created two arrangements for us. An assembly of beautiful bottles deconstructs a formal spray and makes it easy to arrange.

Materials include: Ranunculus, rex begonia, drumstick allium blossoms, and miniature pomegranate branches.

SUBSTITUTIONS: Use your favorite vases or bottles to create your own still life; with a clever clip-art vase as its base.

Materials include: blue Viburnum berries, dusty miller, Echinops, French anemones, silver Brunia, and white tulips.

SUBSTITUTIONS: Any tumble of whites and blues—hydrangeas, lavender, paperwhites, rosemary—would work.

Banchet Jaigla, whose clients include Diane von Furstenberg and HBO, created an unexpected, exotic holiday arrangement that would work in a guest bedroom as well as in a hallway or on a dining table or sideboard. Inspired by her childhood in Thailand, it features a simple, tightly edited grouping of bold, colorful, graphic elements. The inside of the glass vase is wallpapered with foliage to hide the arrangement’s stems.

Materials include: an Anthurium clarinervium leaf, red ‘Indian Summer’ calla lilies, green Cymbidium orchids, Mokara Red Azacoff orchids, white Dutch hydrangea, and aspidistra leaves.

SUBSTITUTIONS: The arrangement is based on making a big statement, not intricacy. Banchet suggests alternates of ‘Green Goddess’ calla lilies for the green orchids, white roses or tulips for the hydrangea, red roses for the red callas, red hypericum berries for the Mokara orchids, Monstera for the Anthurium clarinervium leaf.

Emily Thompson, whose clients include the Horticultural Society of New York, based her arrangement on a belief that humble materials can have as strong an impact as hothouse flowers. She chose oak and magnolia branches for shape, and millet for texture. Pears, grapes, and plums add color and cue the eye for a banquet feast.

Materials include: ‘Purple Majesty’ millet, bittersweet, magnolia leaves, purple clematis flowers, and pinecones.

SUBSTITUTIONS: Shape, height, and form dramatize an arrangement of relatively ordinary elements. Oak and magnolia leaves could be replaced with chestnut, sweet gum, pear, or plum leaves. Any type of grain, such as wheat or broomcorn, would do the expressionistic, skyrocketing work of the millet. Fall fruits look perfect for a Thanksgiving table; orchids would make the piece particularly elegant for New Year’s Eve.

Details on recreating this design: choose a vase, and cut a piece of chicken wire wide enough to form into a ball that can sit in the opening of the vase. Push the ball halfway into the vase: this will secure your branches.

Next, using your largest branches first, build a form and silhouette that you like. Thompson favors asymmetrical shapes, with some branches hanging down toward the table and some reaching up, for a more naturalistic effect.

Finally, wire the stems of fruit onto wire skewers that can be inserted into the arrangement and secured to the branches, leaving enough length of wire skewer so that the fruit will either be at the surface of the leaves or dangle below the arrangement. Then add the most delicate elements, like grasses and flowers, filling in and extending beyond the leaves in a spray.

Remco van Vliet, whose clients include Ralph Lauren and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created an arrangement largely based on texture: the use of many textures in the same family of colors lends peace to the eye, rather than the chaos typical of grander arrangements, a strategy that van Vliet equates with a painter’s technique. As a finishing touch, he let go the vase in favor of a twig bowl, which becomes a part of the design. He calls it a “Dutch still life” — not surprising since van Vliet is Dutch.

Materials include: lotus seed pods, ‘Schwarzwalder’ calla lilies, chocolate cosmos, Scabiosa seed pods, fern fiddleheads, ‘Amnesia’ roses, Cymbidium orchids, and purple artichokes.

SUBSTITUTIONS: Other seed pods, berries, or succulents would work to bring texture and shape to the arrangement. Van Vliet recommends dark-colored dahlias or miniature dark sunflowers for the orchids, any other blush- or sand-colored roses such as ‘Sahara’ or ‘Silverstone’ for the ‘Amnesia’ roses, miniature eggplants or plums for the artichokes, field flowers or grasses for the fern fiddleheads.

Lewis Miller, whose clients include Gucci and the New York Public Library, created an arrangement based on the winter-forest associations of wood and bark, and red, the season’s signature color. Pillar candles, the quintessential holiday lighting, complete the look. The pillars are wrapped like gifts at the bottom like gifts and set on pedestals of tree-branch sections. Most of the elements can be found easily at local flower shops, garden centers, and craft stores.

Materials include: ‘Black Magic’ roses, ‘Piano’ cabbage roses, silver Brunia, and Protea nana.

SUBSTITUTIONS: Miller says the flowers were chosen for their rich color and contrast against the white tones of the birch bark. Red-on-red flowers are complemented by the silver Brunia, which also relates to the silver in the bark. Another color palette different from red would also work, if it’s uniform. Miller suggests natural cork or green sheet moss as an alternative to the birch bark.

Details on recreating this design: staple the bark to a plain pine box. In addition to craft stores, there are good online resources for birch bark, such as birchbarkstore.com, which also sells fireplace logs to create the candle pedestals.

Next, cut the candle pedestals to the desired heights. Line the pine box with plastic—a heavy-duty garbage bag cut to fit is fine—and fill with Oasis floral foam, which will support the arrangement. It is available at craft stores or from online sources. Start by arranging around the perimeter of the box, to conceal the edges of the container. Continue to fill in the center, varying height to create depth and movement.

Finally, wrap the pillar candles with grosgrain ribbon and fasten with pins. Wrap the ribbon with natural rope, such as linen twine or raffia, for a textural, organic contrast.