Mother’s Day Mini Flower Arrangement

Excerpted from The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop by Janit Calvo (Timber Press). 

Instead of giving your mother an ordinary bouquet on her special day, why not make an adorable miniature arrangement, or create an entire garden filled with tiny bouquets?

A miniature garden by itself is a delightful gift, but when you add a few miniature flower arrangements, it just gets prettier. Create a tiny centerpiece for the table or an urn for a corner of the patio. Liven up a bare spot in the garden bed or use a mini bouquet as a distraction to take the focus off of a dormant plant. The tiny arrangements can be placed around the house or used as place-setting gifts at your next party.

Before you begin, take a moment to think about the type of bouquet you want to make. Will it be a cluster of the same flower nestled in some greenery? Or a rustic, country arrangement featuring woody stems, evergreen shoots, and trailing ivies? The real fun in making miniature flower arrangements is that it doesn’t take long to make one, and you can experiment with different arranging styles in less than an hour.

Tiny Flowers Everywhere

Searching for tiny flowers, young leaves, and small branches to use in this project is a great way to appreciate Mother Nature’s smallest details. Collect material from your garden, taking one to three stems from each plant, but resist picking everything at once. You won’t need many stems to fill up the tiny vases, and you can always go back to the garden to collect more if needed.

Bring a pot of water with you to put the blooms in if you are making a bigger bouquet; otherwise you can gather the flowers and greenery for one or two arrangements in one hand. Flowering groundcovers, rockery plants, herb flowers, and miniature roses are great plants from which to harvest small flowers. Some full-size perennial flowers can be used as well; look for plants that send up tiny sprays of blossoms, like saxifrage and coral bells.

Sourcing Vases and Vessels

It is helpful to have a variety of small containers and vases on hand for whipping up a bouquet on Mother’s Day (or any other occasion). Dollhouse stores, thrift shops, antiques shops, and some artist or craft markets are a few places to find small vessels that can be used as a vase in a miniature garden. Search your kitchen for salt and pepper shakers, shot glasses, small liquor bottles, incense holders, and candleholders; these vessels can all be put to work as a vase. Toy kitchen accessories, miniature baskets, tiny baby carriages, and bathtubs meant for dollhouses can all be used as vases and lend a range of themes to a Mother’s Day garden. Poke around your potting bench and garden shed for tiny pots, empty snail shells, and small bowls; they can all be put to use.