Flowers: Blooming with seasonal good cheer

Maria Endah Hulupi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A beautiful bouquet of flowers is guaranteed to brighten up a room, especially during the festive season.

With the following creative ideas from different flower shops, you can make your own arrangement to beautify your home or gift hampers for family and friends.

Glamourette's art director Andy Djati Utomo captured the Christmas colors and mood in a beautiful topiary, one of his shop's special designs.

Andy used a 25-centimeter-tall cone-shaped flower foam, soaked in water. He carefully wrapped it in wire mesh and inserted a 40- centimeter-long bamboo stick under the cone.

Andy placed the bamboo in a terra-cotta pot filled with soaked flower foam. He arranged snake grass to hide the bamboo stick, secured with a jute rope, and covered the surface of the pot with ruskus leaves as ground cover.

He then placed red carnations, white roses, green-hued balloon flowers (asclepias) and dark red celosias all over the foam cone and filled the gaps between the flowers with ruskus leaves.

For the final touch, Andy used white baby's breath as snow flakes and embellished the pot with a large red and white ribbon.

This design is quite simple and the flowers he used can be substituted with other medium-sized ones. It is suitable for all rooms, especially the living room.

Sebastian Ee, a consultant with Blossoms the flower shop at Hotel Mulia Senayan, chose a festive flower design in white and soft green. His design focuses on movement, spaces and textures created by using different sizes of flowers and leaves.

For the vase, Sebastian used a rectangular bamboo vase and filled it with soaked flower foam. He created an elongated shape by installing a one-meter-long corrilus branch along the top center of the foam. At one end of the foam, he inserted a philodendron leaf and a half-meter long white Casablanca flower. At the opposite end of the foam, he put a 50-centimeter-long dracaena with its lower leaves removed and a 50-centimeter-long white ornithogalum.

Sebastian created different textures by embedding a cluster of white roses in one corner of the foam, lined it with silver dollar leaves and created a strand of ruskus leaves next to it. Next, he inserted lilies and greenish white eustoma flowers to cover the other corner of the foam.

He also used asparagus densiflorus on one side of the foam and a papyrus on the other. Finally to add movement, Sebastian extended a long licianthus branch from one side of the vase and secured the other end on the other side of the vase.

The design is suitable to adorn a long dining table or long console in a modern interior.

Ima Soeparman and Maria Alexandra from bunga-bunga flower shop created simple flower designs for gift hampers. They chose red, green and white for Christmas and New Year colors. The arrangement can be displayed separately after the snacks have been removed.

For its Christmas hampers, bunga-bunga chooses a square box, which was also filled with akar wangi and other items such as tea cups, a sugar tin and Christmas cookies. The box was decorated with three small and simple flower arrangements.

For the vase, the flower shop used a medium-sized glass, filled with water-soaked foam and three chrysanthemum flowers or other large flowers like gerbera of the same color were placed in the center. Then daun sulam (or ruskus or other small leaves) were inserted to cover the foam.

Tips for a longer lasting flower arrangement: * Keep the arrangement at room temperature or colder. * Change the water every two days * Avoid direct sunlight * Water the vase or spray the flowers every day * Dry arrangements (ones without vases or soaked foam) may need flower food spray, available in leading supermarkets. * Gently remove wilted petals, flowers or leaves. * Flower stems may need a little trimming every two days.