Simple tulip flower arrangement: ideas and tips

At this time of year, there isn’t an abundance of flowers outside. But you can bring flowers into your home! A few tulips in a vase make life much more enjoyable when it’s grey outside. I am not a professional florist or floral designer but I love to play with flowers. If flowers make you happy too, join me in this blog post where I show you how to make the most of a bunch of tulips.

At the flower market

I usually buy my flowers at the flower market. And this time of year there are plenty of tulips to choose from. They come in almost every colour, pink and purple, yellow and orange. Who can resist them? If you like, have a look at the flower market in my home town in this blog post. Don’t you just love the colourful display of tulips?

I love all tulips, single tulips, double tulips, fringed tulips and parrot tulips. I made a Pinterest board with some of the tulips I bought and photographed throughout the years. You can find it here.

What I love most about tulips is that they are alive. Because they continue to grow after being cut, the stems bend in the vase and the flowers grow bigger and open. I love it when the flowers open completely, transforming from a tight bud to an exotic bloom.

French tulips

This time I bought what we call ‘French tulips’. French tulips are taller with bigger blooms than standard tulips. These flowers do not need much more than a good vase. They are tall, elegant and beautiful on their own.

Simple tulip flower arrangement

But as I said before, I love to play with flowers. I recently bought Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers. It’s a brilliant book, full of gorgeous photos and useful information. I wrote a blog post about it, with some of these gorgeous photos. You can find it here. Floret’s book is also full of techniques on how to make bouquets. One of my favourite techniques, or tools, is the pin frog. A pin frog is a flat, heavy metal base covered in pin-like spikes. This way you can use a shallow bowl for your bouquet. The pins keep your flowers in position.

To make a simple flower arrangement, start by placing the pin frog in the bottom of the bowl. With a small arrangement like this one, there is no need to secure the pin frog. Then fill the bowl with fresh water. Work from the outside in. For foliage, I went outside with my scissors to see what I could find. I used a few branches and twigs to make a frame, it should be uneven. After that, I made a nest of foliage, here I used skimmia. Next, I added the tulips. I removed all leaves from the tulips and bend the petals of the half-open tulips back and open. The flowers opened up wide, giving an altogether different look.

Small vase

To make the most of your bunch of tulips, let’s finish with the simplest of flower arrangements. If you have a few tulips left, cut the stems short and put them in a small vase. Don’t they look cheerful displayed like this?

I hope you enjoyed my version of a simple tulip flower arrangement. I also hope I have given you some ideas to make your own arrangements! If you like, you can pin this image to safe for later:

Books

The books I used as a pedestal for the tulip arrangement are books I love and flip through regularly:

• Dream Plants by Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen with plant information, plant combinations and new photography
• Botanical by Samuel Zeller, colourful and intriguing photographs of botanical gardens
• Bloeiende planten van de wereld, a thrift shop find
• Los Angeles Palms by Marie-José Jongerius, dreamy photographs of the iconic palms of LA
• Botanicum by Katie Scott en Kathy Willis, a beautifully illustrated book I bought as a present for one of my boys. But maybe I like it even better 😉