This time of year it’s hard not to fall head-over-heels in love with hydrangea flowers. We dove into the history and care of hydrangea earlier and we couldn’t resist coming back to show off just how easy it is to work with these seasonal blooms. In the late summer and into autumn, the local British Columbia hydrangea start to show an aged appearance that adds to their depth and interest; the purples turn more blue, the pinks develop brown tones and even the greens get a soft red around the edges. If you want to dry hydrangea blooms, now is the time because the shapes and colours hold up very well.

When arranging with hydrangea, you only need a couple blooms to make a stunning bouquet or vase arrangement. The delicate nature of hydrangea lends well to feminine touches, as we demonstrated here with the lace wrap of a basic bridal bouquet containing just four blooms of purple hydrangea.

For our second bouquet we added blackberries and dried lotus pods to break up the purple and vary the texture. We did a dramatic ribbon wrap simply by picking a few different styles and sizes of ribbon and loosely tying in a bow around the stems.

We foraged the hydrangea from our friend’s yard and the blackberry stems from a house just days before its demolition. When keeping hydrangea stems in water (or any woody stem for that matter) it is important to fill your vase very full with warm water and after trimming the stems, give each a splice upwards into the stem to increase the surface area where the stem can drink from — a quick smash with a hammer works really well too!

Hurry and go arrange a hydrangea bouquet while you can! The large colourful beauties (and blackberries too!) won’t be around much longer!

{Lace bouquet by Janee Auger, lotus pod bouquet by Mary Hudson}