Transcript:
Hey, everyone! Lauren, with garden dancer here and today is a really special day, and the reason is because we are here in. Southern California at Oasis Water-efficient Gardens. But most especially because I am here with Cindy Davison, the founder and owner of the succulent perch. So, Cindy. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for the invitation. Laura, glad to be here, so you’re going to show us how to incorporate live succulents into a fresh flower arrangement. Right, correct? Okay, But before we get into the project. I want to brag on you just a little bit. This creates the most amazing, succulent arrangements. I’ve ever seen, including her incredibly popular, succulent topped birdhouses like this one. You can see all of her. Arrangements on her Facebook page, the succulent perch or on her website. The succulent porch com. If you haven’t seen her Facebook page or website, You really need to so go. Check them out. Cindy is extremely talented and a huge inspiration to me, and she’s also a huge supporter and encourage ur. We just started to get to know each other about six months ago or so this, and I have seen her Come alongside tons of people in the plant world and be a cheerleader and a friend, and I really think that’s rare in a person, so you can see why. I’m so excited to be here. All right, Cindy. Take it away! Well, honey, for this project here. We go for our arrangement. What we’re going to do is start with their vase. This particular one here is a six by six inch glass vase, but you can use anything that you want. As long as it’s going to be holding water, the next thing we’re going to use is an assortment of flowers, and you want the colors to kind of coordinate together since this is a combination of succulents and flowers, of course, we’re going to need an assortment of succulents. I like to choose those that have a little bit of a rosette shape. So it kind of mimics flowers in a sense with this one here is an etch of area Bluebird, and it actually picks up a little bit of the. Um, coloration in its tips with the flowers that we’re going to be using. So I kind of chose an odd number. Things aesthetically work better that way. I’d like to also use a flower food. It really helps with preserving the flowers, so we’re going to have a commercial made floral food, a container measuring cup. A tablespoon for the floral food we’re also going to be wiring and taping and creating false stems with our succulents. So we want to use floral stem tape. What we’re going to be using to create? Our false stems for the succulents are 20 gauge floral wire. That’s 18 inches long, sometimes succulents. I need to be brushed off so a dry paintbrush for that. A ruler snippers and pruners for our thicker greens and I like to have a little bit of a sharpener close by if we need that during our project. Alright, for our first step. What we want to do is really decide where our centerpiece is going to go because that’s going to determine the size as well as our colors. So for instance, if we’re going to do a centerpiece for our dining room table, you may want to coordinate the colors in your flowers, as well as the succulents to go with your interior decor, what? I liked about this, actually. This flower that we’re going to use in our centerpiece is the Alstroemeria or Peruvian lily, and it’s actually the color of Pantone 2015 Marsala, right, and so what I did was, I actually took this branch with me to the nursery here and started searching succulents that have a rosette shape that kind of simulate a rose or another type of flower and what? I really liked about this edge of area. Bluebird was the tips of the succulent mimics and picks up that Marsala color, so we’re all kind of along the same colored trend here throughout our arrangement. I went ahead and chose this single echeverria. Here We are going to use our little snippers and I went ahead and sharpen them beforehand so instead of really emptying this out totally from our container, What I’m doing is just removing some of this soil, and I tend to really like to use succulents, which are dry with the surrounding soil only because wet soil really sticks to each other and job onto you and everything else clean, so as you have then went ahead and removed some of this soil from the center of the Echeverria. You’ll see a bit of a stem there. I’m going to go ahead and take my snippers and remove the roots and the succulent from the soil because we don’t need that now. Sometimes you’ll kind of feel a little residue just from the dry soil, and I use a dry paintbrush and try to remove a lot of that because we will be using a floral stem tape in which there is a couple of parameters for that to work, and one of them is having a very dry and clean surface that you’re going to work on. The next thing. We’re going to do is using our 20 gauge 18 inch floral wire. The thing to remember is when you are inserting your wire. You want to hold it close to the end that is actually going to be inserted into the succulent stem. And you don’t want to have your finger close to, you know where? I’m going with it, okay. You don’t want to poke yourself because you will bleed. I know I’ve done it more than once experienced, so go ahead and I’m kind of in the center of my stem. You can kind of watch how. I’m doing in and I’m going straight through. Sometimes you might go ahead and hit that leaf. So if you just bend it a little bit and then pull it all the way through to the center. Okay, you can kind of see the difference in diameter of our succulents, even though they’re the same type, but they’re plants and they’re not, you know, from a mold with yours on. It’s going to be really tough to put another wire through it. I like to have two wires just for stability, but I can do it with mine, but I’m going to show you a little trick. Okay, so what I’m going to do is just go perpendicular to my first insertion. I’m going right below it and again I’m feeding it through. So basically, you have like a plus sign with your succulent through the center. I’m going to go ahead and put mine down and then if I can show you and Laura how you can still add stability because it’s a rather large head, right arms and weight to it, so it does, so what we’re going to do is just go right in to the succulent right into the bass, so right into the bass here, we didn’t go through the stem, and I want to look through the top to make sure we didn’t come out the other end. Okay, so I maybe went in a quarter of an inch of that, but I can feel and you can feel too that you can hang it on that, So then our next step, what we’re going to do is we’re going to basically fold down our legs. The next thing we’re going to do is use our floral stem tape. We’re not going to take it off of the roll, but we’re going to give ourselves something to work with here again. I’m using the floral stem tape. You want to have a dry surface and you want it to be fairly clean a little bit of a trick for this. We always want to cover our mechanics and kind of the first thing you’re going to learn if you ever went to floral school and what I’m doing here is I’m taking this edge of the tape and I’m pretty much right underneath the last row of the leaves for the succulent, and I’m kind of just holding it right over where the wires are. I’m wrapping it around as I’m turning the succulent now. The key to this is to get the tape, which is actually a little sticky, but to kind of get that going. You want to pull the tape a little bit? If you pull too hard, it’ll break, but that’s okay, because you can go back and add more tape and you’re twisting so meat being right handed. I’m going to twist with my left hand. I’m kind of overlapping the tape while pulling while pulling it a little bit and then with my thumb and my forefinger. I’m compressing it down on itself. I’ve kind of got all the wires bunched together. I get to the point where I’ve got my stem wrapped as you do too, and then I’m going to put my finger and thumb on the top of that twist overlap. And then you can kind of get some speed going pulling your tape at the same time. You’ve got the skills. I’ve done a few hundred thousands of these when I get to the bottom. I’m just gonna with my thumb nail. Pull off that tape! I’ll use my snippers and just cut off the wire and just give it a little pinch so here we’ve made our false stand for our succulents, so we can put this within our centerpiece and it’s not going to be drying up water like our cut flowers and greens well for our next succulent that I want to go ahead and show you then, Laura, how to create a false stem Is our crassula / ferrata string of buttons Since we’ve kind of determined that this stem is really thin. We’re not going to be able to pierce it. It will just kind of fall apart. We’re still going to use our 20 gauge 18 inch wire, but I’m going to put it into like a u-shape. So what we’re doing is creating a support system for the back of this stem, and so I’m actually putting it behind the stem, and that’s what I’m going to be taping with the floral stem Jay. Interesting, okay, so again. I’m going to be kind of twisting, pulling my tape at the same time because that’s kind of what gets it sticky and overlapping on itself. When I find, I’ve got a little bit of room with my left hand that I can get on to the top here. I’m going to be twirling it pulling my tape and then twisting all the way down the stem and we get to the bottom. We just rip off the tape with our snippers. Make a nice clean edge and then just go ahead and up firm that up, so it sticks onto itself. I also like to use a floral food. There is a commercial floral food and this is readily available at amazoncom and so forth and it has three ingredients in it. One is an acidifier. One is an energy source and one is an antibacterial. We’ve got our water. We have our floral food in here. Flowers are conditioned. Succulents have all been wired and taped if we started putting greenery in and that’s always what I start with first, and that kind of gives me the shape of the arrangement. It’ll kind of flop around a little everything kind of like a fish out of water. So what are we going to use to kind of hold everything in place and what I like to use Is Curly Willow branches. These are nice and fresh, so they’re very pliable. You want to have them trimmed up and that’s where your pruners come in handy. Anything that looks really thick. That doesn’t look like it’s going to be able to band and want to just pop out of the container. Just go ahead and cut those okay once. I use these and have them in the water. They’ll start developing little leaves on them, and they’re really cute. Sometimes if they’re really long and so forth on, you can have it where they come out of the base, and that’s okay, It adds an element of texture. I’m kind of going back and separating it a little bit because this is kind of our grid. Okay, that’s going to keep our flowers where we want them to be and our greens and so forth. So what we’re going to do and is what’s on your bucket or in your bucket there? Laura is the eucalyptus branches that we’re going to use to do. So if I was to place this, It’ll be something like this very nice, so I kind of hold it on above my container first before I cut. Okay, then I always go back. Cut at an angle, fresh cut and I’m ready to go into the water and then just go ahead and immerse that and off to the side. So what we’re going to do is a triangle, so we kind of want to mimic what we have here on this side. Okay, so they’re going to be kind of kitty-corner from each other again. You don’t want any plant material That’s going to be immersed in the water. I did so let me just pull it out, Got it? And then, since things aesthetically look better in trees, we’re going to be coming out in a triangular form, but then we have our third, okay, okay, so this one will be again kind of between both of these lengths. Okay, and just one of them, so it’s really delicate. Look, okay, oops, and then. I have a little bit of a leaf underneath my water, so I’m pulling it up. But it’s still the end is immersed in the water, so I don’t have to recut it, so another type of greenery that I chose just to kind of give it a little bulk. I really love the wispy look of the eucalyptus, But I wanted to add again some bulb to it and what we’re going to do is just mimic the shape that I already have there. As far as where are you? Khalipa is placed, okay. I want to go maybe just about because I don’t want to cover the whole thing up, So if we go half way, okay, so you can kind of play with it and just see how the natural? Bend is to the branch and then give it a nice 45 degree angle, cut with your pruners and then just overlap a little bit. So that’s something like this again using your curly willow as your armature to keep things in place and then we’re just going to go ahead and repeat that throughout the arrangement and sometimes things might kind of have a bit of a different. Bend to it that maybe you don’t want, so I kind of began always play with it above or around the base before I would actually cut it off, okay, So the next design element we’re going to do is our focal point and so being into succulents. I’m going to make the succulent the focal point here, so we’re going to choose our large one here, and I want to place it. Where it’s kind of going towards the center of the arrangement as far as the stem goes, but the rosette itself is going to sit on the lip of our vase, so we’ll try to do this without getting anything floating on the bottom of the container with the other greens and so forth and we’re kind of working back ways at this point, but being a centerpiece. We really want everything to look pretty all the way around. We have one large echeverria here, but we have one that’s similar in color, not the same one, and that’s going to be going right next to it. It also looks nice when you do your arrangements where some are kind of receding a little bit and some are coming forward, so it adds a little bit of dimension to it. We’re going to kind of work again in that, keeping that triangular fashion mind, but let’s say. I wanna have something that’s going more towards center here a little bit long, but I’m going to cut it with my pruners. But again we’re not worrying about this being in the water at all, I’m just wanting to kind of camouflage The stem a little bit by putting that towards the center of the arrangement, it’s kind of covered by the stems of our greens, our curly willow and so forth, but again being a centerpiece in the middle of a table. We want it to look well from all sides, but we do want to focus on a focal point. I’m kind of adding to what I have there. I like to kind of angle things a little bit. So the viewer, who is actually sitting at the table is going to see the center of the rosette. We always want to hide our mechanics when you’re doing a floral arrangement, so we will be hiding this tape and so forth with our other beautiful stuff, Beautiful stuff here, so our next step is now that we have our form establish. We have our focal point established, which we’re going to tweak a little bit. Let’s start getting in some of the pretties, then -, so we’re going to start with our alstroemeria here. I’m going to follow the same form. Okay, so our form is basically been established by our greenery and we’re going to start adding some bulk to it a little bit. So what I’m doing is I’m just kind of laying the flower on top to get basically how long I want it to be, and then I’m going to go ahead and cut at a 45 degree angle, putting that through the curly Willow Willow armature into the water, a little more and then just kind of resting on top of the greenery, we’ll continue with our alstroemeria, removing some of these leaves that are a little distracting from the flowers themselves and another design element is rhythm, so we kind of want to not have everything in a straight line because nothing in nature grows in a straight line. So why design that way unless you’re doing something in a geometric form and it’s intentional? Okay, so you want it to flow within the arrangement and I’m going to go ahead and place. This one kind of right in the center here I might play with my height. The little bits into I think we’re still within that 12 to 15 inch range, so as you can see. I’ve kind of got things moving around a little bit here. You do – looks good. Our succulents have kind of shifted around a little bit, but that’s okay, we’ll go back and we’ll fix that later, all right, so now that we have our alstroemeria and let’s go ahead and use our roses and what I did was. I chose some spray roses in which the colors will coordinate with our alstroemeria and so forth as well as with the succulents, it’s kind of the same thing as far as positioning and so forth, but we’re going to put them in a way where they’re not our primary focus. I know the succulents were, but even within the arrangement, so they’re kind of like a secondary flower, and I’ll kind of show you what I mean by that, I’m going to remove some of the leaves on hand on the stem, they’re relatively weak. It doesn’t really add anything, all right, so I’m making my 45-degree angle and I’m kind of using my lilies as a little bit of a guide, but I’m going to be tucking these in a little bit, making sure that I have them in the water source and just kind of accentuating the lilies, so well kind of follow that same pattern right throughout the arrangement, so we have some nice movement again. It really doesn’t shout front back side because being a centerpiece, we want it to look good from all angles, and we do have our focal point with the succulents, which some of them on my arrangement have kind of sunk in a little bit, so I’m going to kind of pull that out a little bit, so they don’t get lost in there and we’ll be adding a little bit more of our plant material. That might help. I think what we’re going to do Next is add. Maybe a secondary filler flower with our white wax flower. So these are nice and long, so it would really accent our lines that we’ve created here again. We want to trim anything that would be below the waterline and it axes a little bit of a filler. We kind of want to have these tucked in a little bit since they’re kind of narrow on top with a like a little pom-pom cluster of petals and kind of play with it a little bit. Move around your greenery Kind of lace it between maybe some of your flowers Kind of want the flowers to stand out more than greens. You can think of the greens as kind of the background as the support system mm-hmm. Our next component is dusty. Miller, I just really like this Soft, silvery gray. Look to it now. You can kind of see the one that I chose. It’s got some issues with the leaves, so I’m just going to snip that off. It’s got a broken branch. It’s got some debris on it. Oh, that is that’s like it. Sorry, yeah, close this a deal it. Really, that is my favorite, that’s amazing. How one element you bring it in and it just kind of it. Kind of makes everything pop. It’s a nice little like background for to it, but especially with pastels. I think it just really adds to it. You can even take some of these individual leaves as well. Oh, and put them in. You don’t have to put it in as a large clump anywhere, so we’ve completed our centerpieces as you can see. We had to kind of fool fiddle a little bit with the succulents, because they tend to kind of get dropped down a little bit. They are a little bit top-heavy but a really kind of a thin stem, so they were getting pushed down very easily to pull out again. Those not need to be in the water. Um, how to care for it? No direct. Sun, okay, and not below, like a heater, bench or air conditioning. Vent, it’ll dry out the flowers indoors. The succulents will do valve for a couple of weeks, maybe the edge of areas. If they aren’t getting enough light, they’ll start to elongate from the center. You’ll notice the rosette shape will be diminishing. You can’t revert that you do put it in brighter light, but the kind of light that we have here today is perfect. They should do well for quite some time and again. The succulents will develop roots within a few weeks, even in other centerpieces would cut flowers or you can plant them in well draining soil in garden or in a container wonderful. I think that they turned out so pretty, and I learned so many different things about design principles and about how to make succulents, you know, be able to fit into an arrangement like this, and I think it’s just amazing. Okay, so okay, so me. Welcome, all right, guys, that is it. I really hope you enjoyed this video. I had a great time, remember to check out Cindy’s website, the succulent perch, calm and her Facebook page, the succulent perch. And, of course, all the links will be down below, And I also want to thank Altman plants for supplying us with such gorgeous succulents for this project, make sure to check out their brand new website. Altman plants, comm and their Facebook page and I’ll leave their links down below as well. Thank You, Cindy, So my pleasure. Laura, and thank you. Everyone so much for watching. See you later, you.