I love to add flowers to any table. It can be dinner, it can be lunch, for two or for twenty, I just think that a few flowers go a long way in heightening the pleasure of a meal.
But that doesn’t mean that I create a huge bouquet or spend hours arranging expensive blooms from the florist. Most often I use flowers and foliage from the garden and display them as simply as possible.
An excellent idea when you don’t have many flowers to hand is to use single heads dotted around the table. It could be in a more symmetrical style with a flower in front of each place setting or neatly lined down the table center. Or it can be loosely scattered between the plates, glasses, and candles. As if petals had been scattered.
Using the flower heads alone, or the blooms on short stems, simply sit them in tiny antique liqueur glasses or pop them into glass vases or small bottles down the table. The effect is immediate and always well received.
Here are a few examples, firstly using a small number of dahlias from the garden, and placed three stems into an old glass bottle that you can find here. They looked great in a straight line down the table center but would work well grouped together in a loose huddle. Bottles of this size are good for multiple small blooms, or single heads of peonies, hydrangeas, sunflowers, or lilacs.
The other option that I often use is antique liqueur glasses (that you can find here). This works well with roses, dahlias, carnations, and zinnias. You are looking for flowers that are wide but not too tall so they can sit comfortably in the glass.