Hydrangeas are one of my favourite flowers.  Although I don’t know why.  They’re snotty little things that look pretty and perky in the store, but 75% of the time once you get them home, they’re ugly and wilted.  Deflated.  A scribble of a flower.

Yet time and time again I come home with them.  Frankly there are only 2 conceivable reasons to explain why I do this.  Either I am sadistic, or I am masochistic.  I’m not sure which one … I always get the two confused.    I’m whichever is the one that describes a person who tortures themselves.

As I explained in my post on how to revive a hydrangea, if you end up with a wilted one it isn’t the end of the world, you just have to spend a little time on bringing it back to life.  But still.  It can be a pain.  I mean, I know with a little work I could bring my bum back to life too, but … I’d rather it just hadn’t wilted in the first place.

Anyhow, consider this fair warning if you’re gonna do today’s Flower of the Week!  I came up with this simply out of boredom.  Hydrangeas must be the easiest flower in the world to arrange.  I mean you can literally just stick them in a big round cylinder vase and they look fantastic.  Tall vase, short vase, square vase, round vase … doesn’t matter.  As long as you stick 3 large hydrangeas in it, it’ll look good.

So I decided to challenge myself a bit to do something I hadn’t done with a hydrangea before. I took my hydrangea out for a night of dinner and dancing.  No I didn’t.

I did this …

The Square Hydrangea Arrangement

You’ll need these …

and a block of this.

Just a quick note for beginners … Oasis is floral foam you soak in water for fresh flowers.  Sahara is floral foam you use for silk or other fake flower arrangements.  Soak your Oasis until it’s heavy.  Doesn’t take long 15 minutes – 1/2 hour or so.

Cut Oasis in half

Measure the Oasis.

Cut and add whatever you need to, to make the cube perfectly square.

Secure the Oasis

I just break some wood skewers in half.

And then stick them in the corners.

You have to push them down all the way.  Use the end of another skewer if you want.

Now you’ll have a secure, completely square cube.

Mine measures 4.25″ x 4.25″x4.25″  (WxHxD)

Pinch your flower heads

Take a look at the underside of your hydrangea head.

See how each huge hydrangea is actually made up of 5 smaller flower stems?

And each of those stems are made up of several even smaller flower steams?

You need to snap those off and separate them.

Like this:

I find not moisturizing and not doing your nails helps to create a better arrangement.

It’s par for the course really in the rough and tumble world of flower arranging.

This is one of the 5 branches inside a Hydrangea.

This is one of the branches inside THAT flower head.

Insert your little flower bits into the Oasis cube.

Start with the top and then do the sides.

Start sticking your flowers into the Oasis

Keep the flowers relatively level (I don’t mind a bit of error actually, it makes things prettier if you ask me)

Push the flowers in as far as you can.  You don’t want big and poofy.  You want flat.

Even flat will end up looking huge and poofy.  Trust me.

If you’re having trouble getting the stems into the Oasis you can use your skewer to poke a hole in the Oasis and then insert the flower stem.

With some of the smaller stems the skewer may make too big of a hole, so find something smaller to poke a hole.

A piece of spaghetti for instance.

Keep working around the cube with your tiny flower clumps until it’s completely covered.

I’m gonna warn you right now that 3 large hydrangeas is just BARELY enough to do this cube.  You might be wise to trim your cube down to 4″x4″x4″.

There are also far more fantastic things that you could do with these cubes and floral foam shapes, but I wanted to show you something that didn’t cost 1 million dollars to do.  This is something you really can do with $10 worth of hydrangeas.  Not $50 worth.  Although that would be fun!

Push and pull on your flowers until it’s most cube like.

What I think is the most fun about this is you can place it anywhere.  It doesn’t have to go in a vase, or in a plate with water (although it will live longer if you do that).  You can just stick it on a tray like a sculpture or object d’art and enjoy.

To care for the arrangement, soak it every night in a plate of water.  You can actually plunge the whole thing underwater if you’re careful. Hydrangeas love water.  Then put it back on display.  Like so …

As nice as this is,  you to keep in mind … this arrangement involves Oasis and hydrangeas.  So it’s a crapshoot at best. You could wake up in the morning to a perfectly preserved arrangement, or you could wake up in the morning to something that looks as if you really did take it out for a night of dinner and dancing.   And drinking.  And debauchery.

… cause he’s good like that.