Fashionable Fakes

There's nothing quite like walking into a room and seeing a beautiful arrangement of flowers, but unfortunately most people can't afford to have fresh flowers in the house every day of the week. Artificial flowers have been around for years, but in the past they always seemed to look tacky and usually ended up just collecting dust. The good news is that modern fake flowers and fruit are absolutely fantastic, and almost impossible to tell from the real thing without a very close inspection. An arrangement will cost a little bit more than one bunch of flowers, but in the long term fashionable fakes are very economical.

Creating arrangements

Jo Arthur, principal florist at Rick Eckersley Flowers in Melbourne, demonstrated how to select flowers and put together two arrangements. The first consisted of orchids arranged on bamboo stakes in a shallow bowl. The bowl was covered with moss and weighted down with river stones. The other was a centrepiece for a dining table made up of gardenias arranged around a gardenia scented candle, and then sprinkled with fragrant oil.

Points to consider

Choose a position in the room and a style for your arrangement, taking into consideration the colour of your furnishings. For example you may decide on a low arrangement to go on a coffee table, or a taller one against a wall. The style could be stark and dramatic using vibrant colours, or you could go for soft colours. Low glass bowls are suitable for using pebbles and doing Japanese-style displays, urns are best for displaying fruit, and opaque vases are good to camouflage the construction of floral display. Don't crowd arrangements. It's better to stay with one or two different types of flowers with added greenery. Jo suggests that the best way to clean artificial flowers is to blow any dust away with a hair dryer.

Further information

The total cost for the display of orchids and river stones was about $175. The gardenia arrangement was around $145 including the candle. Fashionable fake flowers are available from many florists and flower outlets around Australia. Flowers cost from $5-$20 per stem, and fruit cost from $4 per piece to $18 for a stem with a number of fruit. We filmed our segment at Rick Eckersley Flowers in Melbourne,

Rick Eckersley
Eckersley Garden Architecture
03 9421 5537
info@e-ga.com.au
www.e-ga.com.au

Worth a look

If in Sydney, try Appletree Design, 168 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood. Phone: (02) 9904 6634.

NB: Take care with your choice of candle. In WA strict requirements exist controlling the sale of candles in some flower arrangements.

Copyright CTC Productions 1999