Tips for making your faux flowers look real without blowing the budget

Faux flowers are great value, can be adapted easily, are ideal for allergy sufferers and pet owners and nowadays look so realistic you often can’t even tell they are not real. Here are a few useful tips for using faux flowers in a very natural way that makes them as convincing as possible with minimum cost.

Consider what vase you intend using. The narrower the neck of your vase the fewer stems will be needed.

Use lots of foliage and leafy structural stems with only a few focal flowers unless you are opting for a vase full of the same stem en masse.

Bend stems and the heads of the flowers. Real flowers are not perfect so make sure that your arrangement is not too perfect symmetrical or stiff. Pull them down and forward. Mess them up a bit.

Don’t keep the same arrangement in the same vase in the same place for years. Change them around. Put them in a different vase. Move the position or change which room they are in. Take a couple of the focal flowers out and replace them with some seasonal stems without altering the main body of the arrangement and it will immediately look like new.

To obtain the right height bend the stems as they can then be straightened and re-used later. But... in a a glass vase they will need to be cut with wire cutters.

Using a ceramic vase and the stems are a little too short? Simply stuff the vase with newspaper or tissue to provide a base for your stems so that they are the right height.

If you are using a glass vase and want to give the impression that the flowers are real you can add water. Check that the stems are not wrapped in paper, like our Veronica or melaleuca, as these are not suitable. If the stems have been cut and the metal wire is showing apply some clear nail varnish and leave to dry to avoid rust marks on the glass. Mix with some real foliage or flowers for a really authentic look.