Petals & Roots: How to Style a Mantelpiece With Spring Flowers – A Simple, Elegant Idea for Capturing the Season

As soon as the garden starts to gently nod back into life, the first thing I want to do is bring some of it inside to celebrate the start of the spring season. And where better to create a focal arrangement than a mantelpiece?

This kind of design idea is less about one big bouquet or bowl arrangement, and more about creating a gentle, natural curation of the season using small vintage vessels, and soft pastel shades.

In the most recent episode of Petals & Roots, I show you how to build and design a beautiful, seasonal design that looks professional but in fact is incredibly easy to achieve.

What You Need For This Floral Design Idea

• A selection of mis-matched ceramic vintage vessels, old tins, bud vases and glass bottles. Although it is new, this green bud vase from Target has amazing vintage appeal, and would look great paired with a selection of floral blue Chinoiserie bud vases, such as these ones from Amazon
• Floristry scissors, such as these ones from Amazon
• A small watering can with a narrow spout
• A selection of your favorite spring flowers

How To Create A Spring Mantelpiece Design

The first step in building this design idea is placing your vessels on your mantelpiece.

Rather than spacing them all out evenly, cluster a few together at one end and dot them at different depths. This will make the design look much more natural and organic.

I paired an eclectic mix of vintage ceramic ink wells that I've been collecting for years, in a range of earthy tones and sizes, with an old Fortnum & Mason tea caddy and some decorative glass bud vases with interesting shapes.

These have all been in my collection of vases for a long time; I think one of them might have started life as a reed diffuser.

The next step is to lay out your flowers and look at the shapes they make and the movement in the stems.

For this design, I used catkins, pussywillow, tulips, miniature narcissi and hyacinths in complementing pastel shades.

You might want to add blossom branches for structure, or add some snakeshead fritillaries, muscari and bluebells if you want a bolder color scheme.

When you are ready to arrange, start with the garden branches or foliage to create height and structure along the mantelpiece.

This will create a loose framework and shape within which the softer flowers can sit.

Then, place the flowers in smaller groupings rather than as single stems or one large arrangement.

You can place them in by variety, to make the process really simple. And as if it were a canvas, build up your living floral painting with each new type of flower you add in.

Vary the heights and really looking to celebrate the natural movement in these flowers. If a tulip is bending dramatically to one side, let it do so and allow it flow naturally alongside the other blooms.

I love to embrace negative space in a design like this. Rather than needing to fill everything with a mass of flowers, allow stems to move and enjoy the space created between them as part of this design. It will make the design feel calmer and more intentional.

After all, the spring garden is only just waking up, and there will be so much more to come in the months ahead.

What to Shop

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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