Tillandsias, with their explosive little forms and gorgeous green tones, are great in bouquets. I’ve been playing around with ways to use them so they don’t get lost among the other plants. Here I decided on a deep dark begonia leaf for contrast; I love the way the chartreuse of the tilly really stands out against that dark leaf.

The technique for prepping the tillandsias is the same as for succulents; even simpler, actually. Just insert a length of thick-gauge wire into the root area of the plant and trim the wire to the appropriate length. You have to be a little gentle with the tiny tillandsias (like the one pictured above) so you don’t shear off any of its leaves, but basically it couldn’t be easier to give these air plants “stems.”

Last week, with the help of the fabulous Julie Benjamin of Little Lane Studios (moms, take note… you must see Little Lane), I decorated the Target Wine Cube booth at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Using three earthenware cubes (to mimic the shape of the wine boxes), we created three tall, leggy arrangements for the shelf along the back of the booth, and on the table in the center we made a little landscape with live moss and some clusters of succulents nestled inside.

Most cut orchids come from Hawaii, but these deep bronze cymbidiums are grown in Salinas. We used some fun succulents, too, including the crasula featured here.

We wired some little succulent rosettes directly onto the magnolia branches to give the tall arrangements some more interest up high. I love how those turned out!

The silvery cerifera palm fans we used came from plants grown on our Southern California farms. And the moss is actually “live moss,” cut fresh from the forest. Moss like this is just so much more textured and lovely than dried decorative moss… in this photo you can really see all the little different shapes of moss mixed in. We sell it at the nursery; it’s gorgeous for potted plants if you keep it nice and moist.

We had so much fun with this project! Stay tuned for a fun how-to later this week.

Saul and I are on vacation this week, so we stopped at the farmers’ market Saturday on our way out of town, hoping to bring some flowers along to brighten up our rental cabin. I was so excited to find these anemones, one of my absolute favorite flowers. They’re from Cypress Flower Farm, a wonderful family-run flower grower in Half Moon Bay. I arranged them with some foliage from my garden (leucadendron Safari Sunset, and of course pieris, another one of my favorites for bouquets).

Okay, off to relax and enjoy these beauties. Have a great week!

Today I had the fun opportunity to play around with a mixed succulent palette in a bouquet. Don’t they just look good enough to eat? Like a candy shop.

A client wanted a long-lasting arrangement to display in her home while it’s being shown by her realtor. Succulents are a perfect alternative to traditional cut flowers when you want something that will stay fresh for a good long while. In my experiments I’ve found that echeveria and sedum varieties tend to be super-hardy (staying pretty for a few weeks, at least), while aeoniums, for example, wilt a bit sooner (but still last a lot longer than most cut flowers). So I stuck with echeveria and sedum for this bouquet, adding some trailing “string of bananas” to soften up the shape.

The pretty gray pumice I used to fill the vase disguises the succulents’ wire stems and also provides a bonus function: it acts almost like floral foam, holding the stems in place exactly where I want them.

While I secretly love (or not-so-secretly, I guess, since it’s going on my blog!) this gray and stormy weather, I do find myself a little color-starved. When the blue sky peeked out yesterday, I felt oddly giddy. So here’s a little colorful pick-me-up for all of you, from back in the fall… we installed this at a bakery with gorgeous slate gray walls.

Winter gets a pretty bad rap, doesn’t it? The stereotypical winter landscape is a blanket of barren white, but in California there’s still so much vibrant color to be found. Our occasional rains (more, please!) cause lush growth spurts and leave the gardens around town looking fresh and green. And some of our favorite proteaceous plants, of course, keep on putting out their showy pink blooms all winter long.

I’ve been finding some really fun color for our seasonal winter bouquets. Let’s take a look…

Aren’t those little baby pomegranates too adorable? I love the ones that are cracking open, showing the bright red seeds. And the golden color of their skins is just such a nice contrast to the echeveria’s sweet purple hue.

Viburnum is great for flower arranging, especially when it’s not fully in bloom; the clusters of pink and white buds (center of the bouquet above) are perfect for filling in holes with a little splash of color.

I’ve also been playing around with various eucalyptus that bloom around this time of year. To me, these are just so emblematic of San Francisco, right down to their distinctive fragrance, which really permeates certain neighborhoods. And the red and pink starburst-like flowers are so whimsical and fun.

I don’t know, maybe it’s the Irish in me, but I’m a little obsessed with heather. It lasts forever, it’s field-grown, and the bright jewel-tone purple strikes me as really festive and fresh. I love how it contrasts with the chartreuse leucadendron here. The silvery acacia was an afterthought—one of the trees in our nursery garden needed pruning, and I lucked out!—but I think it adds a great unexpected note of blue.

Pincushions are just coming into season, and I am soooo excited. Check out the crazy pink tips on this one: Leucospermum Guensii. Combined with the pink-edged echeveria… it’s like a carnival in there! Love it.

I can’t wait to see what else we can bring in as the season evolves and spring approaches. Later this week, I’ll have a sneak peek at some of our Valentine’s Day offerings, so stay tuned!

Succulents may not seem like the most likely cutting garden plant, but in fact they’re gorgeous in flower arrangements, and especially at the holidays. Those silvery greens and pinks are just perfect at this time of year. And of course, when you’re finished with your succulent cuttings, you can plant them right back in your garden and they’ll take root. A truly sustainable cut flower!

I’m going to teach you an incredibly simple technique to use when you want to incorporate succulents in your bouquets and centerpieces. If you want step-by-step video instructions, there’s a great tutorial here, created by L.A.-based florist Flower Duet. All you really need are a few basic floral supplies, available at craft stores, or of course at the Flower Market down at 6th and Brannan. (Floral Supply Syndicate is open to the public.) Your supplies:

• Thick-gauge floral wire (comes in 18″ lengths)
• Thinner paddle wire
• Floral tape

Of course you’ll also need some succulents of your choice. I used little 2-inch and 4-inch plants from the nursery, but you can just as easily take cuttings from your own garden. Here’s how to prepare them:

Gently remove all soil and the tiny, thread-like roots branching out from the central root. Keep this central root intact. Remove any dead leaves, then wash the plant by swirling it in a basin of clean water, and dab it dry.

Insert a length of thick-gauge wire directly into the plant’s central root, giving it a “stem.” If your succulent and its root are especially sturdy, you may be able to stop right here. As long as you tuck the wire in among other foliage and flowers, all you will see is the succulent rosette.

If your succulent or its root are a bit more flimsy, use a length of paddle wire to secure it. Fold the top third of a piece of paddle wire down over itself, making a loop. Align the loop with the plant’s central root and the thick-gauge wire. Then take the long end of the paddle wire and wind it around the loop, the root, and the thick-gauge wire, binding all three together. (This step is actually simple but hard to describe; check out the Flower Duet’s video tutorial for a demo.)

For a cleaner look, use floral tape to cover the root and wires. Pull the floral tape taut as you work so that it sticks to itself (and make sure it’s kept dry while you’re working).

Now you’re ready to place the succulents in your arrangement, just as you would any other flower. They’ll last a few weeks, at least, and of course you can just remove the wire and plant them in your garden when the other flowers are long gone. The rosettes of these echeveria varieties, with their muted color palette, are stunning mixed with seasonal foliage and some delicate local hydrangea. I just can’t get enough of them!

We were having a tough time deciding on the name for our new Cutting Garden item. It’s the holiday season and all, but “Holiday Bouquet” just brings to mind some kind of poinsettia explosion. So instead we went with the rather less catchy “December Bouquet.” It’s December. It’s a bouquet. There you have it.

I’ll be making some samples this Friday and posting photos above, but here’s a little something lovely as a stand-in:

Circa December of last year, this bouquet does include (gasp!) imported proteas, a variety I've never seen from local growers. Won't be using these this year, of course, but they sure are pretty, aren't they?

We’ll be doing weekly deliveries on Fridays all month long, so the December Bouquet is a perfect choice if you’re hosting a holiday party. If you’ve got questions or special requests, or if you’d like a few special arrangements for your event, just drop me a line at susie@floragrubb.com.

Finished the Thanksgiving centerpieces yesterday. Lots of fun! They’re tooling around the city on the delivery truck as we speak. I used lots of persimmons, my favorite proteas, a gorgeous chartreuse geranium leaf, some snowberries, and even a surprisingly blooming crabapple from the Central Valley (confused, no doubt, by our recent warm weather).

I’m too wiped out (and frankly too busy baking!) to write much more now, so I’ll have to leave you with some photos instead. We’ll have some lovely little bouquets in the store this weekend for our Thanksgiving open house (along with fresh pecan cookies, courtesy of me and my mom), so if you want to see some flowers in person, now’s your chance. Have a happy holiday!

Sigh. I have to admit, I was so in love with this pretty piece. It actually made me a little sad to hand it off to the client. And now I can’t stop gazing at the photo. It’s the wallpaper on my desktop.

I think part of the reason I love this one so much is that to me it really says San Francisco. I grew up here, and so there are certain plants that grow well and abundantly in the area that evoke some deep nostalgia in me.

Arbutus (”strawberry tree”), the branch with the little white buds and the red and yellow dangling fruits, is a common street tree around here. When I was a kid my friends and I used to stand at the school bus stop and pelt each other with the fruits.

We had hydrangeas in our backyard. They were my mother’s pride; she’s not a huge gardener, but she loved those hydrangeas, and now, wouldn’t you know it, despite my best efforts to develop my own tastes, I love hydrangeas too. Certain varieties just love it here in our mild climate. These particular ones were grown in misty Half Moon Bay.

Those bright magenta flowers aren’t something I remember from my childhood, but they sure are everywhere in San Francisco now. They’re a succulent, calandrinia, and they’re growing all up and down Guerrero Street, in a planting designed by Flora. There are also a few of them growing in our little sidewalk garden in front of the nursery, so I actually snipped these and added them at the last minute, to pick up the bright purple of the heather. I love the way those magenta flowers hover over the greenery. Flora said she thought they looked like butterflies landing on it.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that there’s a particular beauty to flowers and plants grown locally and in season. Their beauty is soul-stirring, because it evokes the actual natural world. Giant, picture-perfect roses flown in from Brazil, or stargazer lilies grown in a Dutch hothouse, or even genetically modified gerberas in Skittles colors, just somehow seem to me to have very little to do with nature. Which doesn’t mean they’re not pretty—but it may mean, for some of us, that they just don’t have the same emotional pull.

Personally, I also have a hard time enjoying more “traditional” cut flowers these days, now that I’m more aware of their environmental impact. At our workshop last weekend, Jim shared his experience of opening boxes of Brazilian roses for events and finding himself enveloped not in the flowers’ own perfume, but in a cloud of pesticide fumes. Yuck. Now it’s hard for me to look at a bunch of supermarket roses and appreciate their beauty without thinking of that story.

There are international growers, of course, that are adopting organic practices and seeking environmentally responsible solutions. Websites like Organic Bouquet do a great service in bringing business to these farms. But there’s still something more appealing about a locally grown, low-impact bouquet, and it’s not just the reduced carbon footprint.

Saul and I try to eat seasonal, locally grown food, not just because it’s a responsible thing to do, but because it often tastes better. The potatoes that come in our CSA box are seriously the earthiest, most velvety little things you’ve ever tasted. The mint cut from our own garden is ten times more fragrant and flavorful than the kind that comes in the plastic shell at Safeway. And the principle, with flowers, is the same: There’s nothing quite like the wild beauty of a fresh-from-the-garden bouquet.

So there’s my little spiel about locally grown flowers. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week to report from the trenches as I work on the Thanksgiving centerpieces. There’s still time to order (in our new web shop!) if you haven’t yet… all California-grown flowers, many of them from our very own farms. I might even get to sneak a few snips from the nursery garden again, if I’m lucky. Can’t wait!