Flowers for Entertaining 

Flowers really bring a home to life.  Don't think of them as only being for your dining table, dress the rooms you will use including your hallway, guest bathroom and bedrooms if anyone is staying. 

Flowers don't have to be expensive.  Go to a flower market early in the morning the day before your party and use foliage from your garden or alternatively we have some easy and effective ideas for supermarket flowers. Real flowers are always preferable but as an economical alternative you could buy good quality artificial flowers and mix them with real foliage meaning you would only have to replace the foliage each time.

Make sure you buy the flowers enough in advance of your party so that they have time to open and look their best.

There are different styles you can use to easily create maximum impact. The simplest one is to use repetition.  Take 3 or 5 vases (or even milk bottles if the occasion is informal) and line them up neatly along a surface and place a single stem in each. We used vintage bottles bought from eBay for the one's in our photograph.

For a formal party you can have more extravagant flower arrangements; an abundance would be ideal and give a true sense of luxury, but, obviously this would be more expensive.  Try to match the flowers with your interior. If you live in a contemporary home try single colours with grass curved over the top or for a more traditional look cluster the colours and flower types into groups within a multicoloured arrangement. With either of these styles you can add simple votive candles at each place setting and small containers with a single stem so there is something of interest to the eye at different levels.

For a houseguest you could go for a little vintage style and put a rose filled cup and saucer beside their bed. Not only will it be pretty, it will smell heavenly as they drift off to sleep.