Outside of design, the biggest challenge to creating a beautifully balanced bouquet is knowing what flowers to put together. So let’s chat about the basics of how to build a floral recipe!

**This post contains affiliate links that allow me to support my family while bringing you beautiful, inspiring content. Thanks so much for your support!**

To keep things simple, I’ll be linking to two of my favorite floral shops: Afloral and HouseFloral. Each of them have good quality stems, excellent product descriptions and pictures online, and wonderful customer service. Afloral tends to have more the basic classic flower types and greenery while HouseFloral carries some extra textural blooms and greenery that help fill in the gap to create that ultra-realistic faux look.

1. Pick Your Color Palette

Choose what general colors you would like your bouquet to be. If you’re not sure, I often recommend turning to Pinterest! I’ll link my floral inspiration board here if you’re not sure where to start.

2. Choose Different Sizes of Flowers

If you’re not familiar with flower names or types, focus on picking blooms that are different sizes. Some should be small and petite with a diameter of 1-2 inches, while the majority will probably have a diameter of 3-4 inches, and you might have 1-2 feature blooms that are larger with a diameter of 5-7 inches if you’re planning to have a really large bouquet. (The product descriptions for both shops I recommend always include these dimensions). Intermixing those different sizes is the best start to giving your bouquet a realistic look.

Here are some examples from x-small to large:

3. Choose Different Kinds of Flowers

You don’t have to be an expert on flower names to pick out different types of flowers. Just pay attention to the shape of the blooms, the way its petals lay, and what its center looks like. Based on that, try to pick 3-5 flower types that look different from each other.

Here is an example of flowers that are all the same color but have drastically different looks because of their size, the way their petals lay, and their center details:

4. Add Texture

If you’re trying to create a loose and sprawling garden bouquet, try to add in a few elements like queen anne’s lace and tall skinny florals that give height and dimension. If you’re hoping for a more moody or wildflowery bouquet, add in berries or thistles.

5. Pick Greenery

First, you need to decide whether you like flowy, classic, light and airy greenery or darker, moodier, foresty greenery. Once you’ve decided that, pick 2-3 different kinds within those categories and order at least 3 stems of each. If you’re hoping for a large lush bouquet with draping greenery everywhere, you’re going to want to pick more like 3-5 kinds and order 5-7 stems of each.

6. What Quantities To Buy

So you’ve chosen your florals but now how many of each should you buy? With floral design, you can’t go wrong having 3 of every stem. If you’ve watched my tutorial, you know I like to build my design around visual triangles. So for everything below, plan to order around three!

Exceptions would be:

• If it’s a very large bloom over 6″ diameter – you’ll probably use only one in the center.
• It’s a very long greenery or texture stem with multiple branches coming off of it that you can clip and use individually.
• If you plan to create a huge statement bouquet, you might want to up your quantities to 5 instead.

You may not use all 3 of each stem. If fact, you’ll probably have a few left over because I always do. But you can always clip the stem for a little vase and use single or leftover blooms as decor in your home!

7. Let Go of Perfectionism and Have Fun

If you’re anything like me, you can pull up a website to order 6 times a week and still never place an order because you can’t decide. Listen, if you’ve followed the steps above and you’ve watched my bouquet tutorial, you can’t go wrong. Something beautiful WILL come out of what you order and create. So just pull the trigger, get your favorite cup of coffee, and sit down and start having fun playing with design!

Example Recipes

White Classic Bouquet

Blush Peony & Anemone Bouquet

Vibrant Summer Bouquet

Moody Fall Bouquet

See how the flowers coordinate in the example recipes above even though they’re all different? When you add your florals to your cart, take a second to look at all those product photos together and make sure nothing sticks out like a sore thumb. Think of it as a mood or design board for your bouquet! As long as all the photos look like they flow together, I promise they will in real life too. So go ahead and press that “complete order” button and get ready to design your first faux-realistic Rosewood inspired bouquet.