Petals & Roots: How to Create a High-Impact Allium Vase – for an Effortless Floral Centerpiece This Summer

As Coco Chanel famously coined, simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance. I believe this sentiment stretches much further than fashion, and certainly into the world of floral design.

Designing with only one variety of flower is not only simpler for you, it creates an effortlessly stylish effect that can elevate a room or patio dining table in seconds. It was a trick I used a lot when I was a wedding florist (provided the client agreed), as it was especially useful for simplifying large, statement floral arrangements.

The key to this is in your flower selection and the vase you choose. In the most recent episode of Petals & Roots, I show you how to create a high-impact summer design using alliums in one of my favorite vintage vases.

What You Need For This Allium Floral Design

• For this design I used 17 allium stems
• Floristry snips, such as these ones from Amazon are vital. Spending a bit more on a really good pair of sharp snips or shears pays off as they will last and make light work when cutting through any stem
• A tall, vintage vase. You can scroll down to see my vase edit for inspiration. I also love this blue and white vintage-style vase from Amazon, which would look beautiful on an outdoor table.

How To Create This Design Yourself

As I mentioned, this design relies on the right choice of vase, and a statement variety of flower.

Let's talk about the flowers first. I chose seasonal alliums because they are naturally a sculptural flower, with long, straight stems and also minute layers of interest within their flower heads.

Other flowers you could consider for this kind of design (depending on the season) are hydrangeas, Icelandic poppies, peonies, snapdragons and orchids.

Large alliums come in shades of purple and white, and I chose to keep mine to purple only, selecting three different varieties in the design: gladiator, pinball wizard and schubertii. The latter being the most distinctive and adding a different dimension to the textures and forms in the vase.

If your flowers are more or less the same in shape, you could vary the color options and keep them to a tonal palette or three simple, complementary shades.

Your vase selection will be a personal choice, and possibly governed by what you own already. I wanted something that reflected the curves in the alliums, and a vessel that offered a different color into the floral arrangement.

Choose something that is fairly tall and has a narrow neck, to make it easier to hold your stems in place.

If you can, look at the colors on your vase and see if you can pick any out or complement them with the flowers you choose.

To create a design like this, start by adding three to five of your tallest stems into the vase, which will give you a structure to build from.

Next, introduce another color or variety of flower and bring these lower down into the design, starting to fill out the space.

I added the largest alliums in last as they had shorter stems, and I slotted these into the grid I'd created with the taller ones, to place them higher up in the design.

Then it's simply a case of adding flowers to make the design bigger and create interest from all sides. (I told you it was easy, didn't I?) Make sure you have some shorter flowers lower down, vary the sizes, and if you have a particularly curvy stem, keep it long and let it dance above the rest of the design.

Top Tip: To reduce the onion smell that naturally comes from alliums, change the water in the vase regularly. This will also help to keep your flowers as fresh as possible.

Shop My Vase Edit

Petals & Roots is a weekly video series fronted by me, Rachel Bull, Head of Gardens at Homes & Gardens. Every weekend on social, I share my seasonal gardening and flower arranging expertise and advice.

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