DIY FORAGED ARRANGEMENTS

This is the best bouquet bargain you’ll ever get: greens and flowers you’ve gathered from around your own neighborhood.

This is the best bouquet bargain you’ll ever get: greens and flowers you’ve gathered from around your own neighborhood.

Bouquets of fresh flowers and greens add so much to your home. But let’s face it: Keeping fresh flowers on hand can get expensive. Is there a way around this? Absolutely. In her new book Field, Flower, Vase: Arranging and Crafting with Seasonal Wild Blooms, Chelsea Fuss teaches how to gather and arrange the flowers and greens that grow in your area. “I prefer to think of flower arranging as taking a small sampling of nature inside,” she writes.

EXPLORING

Start your foraging by going on a walk in your neighborhood. Look for plants you can arrange, and try not to start with a very specific vision. “Forget everything you think a flower arrangement should look like,” Fuss says.

Instead, let your findings create the bouquet as you go. “I err on the side of unruly and primitive, as opposed to symmetrical and manicured,” she writes.

Remember to be respectful. Don’t pick a handful of roses out of your neighbor’s front yard but focus instead on wild plants. Even weeds growing in the cracks of the sidewalk or branches from local trees can be great sources. “Look in abandoned lots, traffic islands, parking lots and wild areas unkept in your city,” Fuss writes.

THINK LIKE A STYLIST

Think about where in your home you’ll display what you find. “I think more like a stylist than a florist when working with flowers,” Fuss writes. For example, match the flower colors with the colors in your house, and cut greens to fit the size of the vase you think you might use for the arrangement. Don’t be afraid to mix foraged plants with flowers you buy at the grocery store or farmer’s market too. Adding a few branches from a foraging walk can revive an arrangement you bought a week ago, as you take out the flowers that are wilting.

“For this meadow-on-your-desk, go for a walk and gather stems of wildflowers in a lot of different varieties,” Fuss writes. This arrangement includes cow parsley, thistles, wild roses, willowherb, campion, grasses and dandelions. (opposite) Foraged arrangements make great hostess gifts. Fuss gifts meadow arrangements like this one “delivered in a terra-cotta cup instead of paper wrapping.” This arrangement contains gomphrena, grasses and dandelions.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA FUSS

Don’t be afraid to mix a wide variety of plants together in a foraged arrangement. “Spanish daisies, wild roses, grasses and dandelion seed heads mimic a summer wildflower meadow,” Fuss writes.

FIELD, FLOWER, VASE: ARRANGING AND CRAFTING WITH SEASONAL AND WILD BLOOMS BY CHELSEA FUSS, PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS, © 2021; ABRAMSBOOKS.COM.