Arranging Feelings and Flowers
Content Overview: Minor self-disclosure regarding mental health, benefits of arranging flowers
I started arranging flowers for myself during my sophomore of college, shortly after being diagnosed with depression, for no reason other than I felt like it and I thought it would cheer me up.
Turns out I was right. (Well, kind of. Disclaimer: arranging flowers is definitely not going to fix depression, but it might make a dent or at least get you out of bed for a few minutes that day, or, alternatively, if you feel like you can’t leave bed, you at least have something bright to look at on your dresser as you wait for the waves of depression to pass).
I’ve arranged flowers for myself every other week or so for the past decade. So now, I’d like to share a few tips, tricks, and ways in which it has been beneficial.
Tips and tricks for arranging flowers:
Do not start with the goal of having a gorgeous, pretty, or presentable bouquet. Arranging flowers is hard. It’s likely the first couple times you do it, it’ll be a little ugly. That’s okay, because really, there’s no such thing as ugly flowers. Just do your best.
Pick out flowers that feel meaningful to you in that moment. Pick whatever. There are no rules. Fillers, focal flowers, whatever.
Focus on the colors, textures, and scents that you feel called to. Maybe life has felt rough around the edges, so you go for a soft tulip. Maybe you need yellow to pull you out of sadness, or you want red to make you feel motivated and passionate. If life has been incredibly overwhelming and you want something to ground you when you walk past it, pick lillies or roses or eucalyptus, because you can smell those things for miles.
Flowers can be expensive, but there are different ways to create floral arrangements. Cheaper places to find physical flowers would be the discount bins at grocery or floral shops. On Canva (or pinterest, etc.,), you can find free images of flowers and place them together to arrange an image of a bouquet that you can save as a phone background. Also, many folks make flowers out of materials found around the house including pipe-cleaners, paper, clay, tissue paper, toilet paper rolls….pretty much anything that can be cut or bent into the shape of a petal or leave will work.
Anything can be a vase as long as it doesn’t leak, tip over, and you’re not using it to eat/drink. Soup cans. Almond milk containers. Whatever works, works.
Set your flowers up for success and take care of them.
Before putting them in the vase, remove all of the leaves that would be touching the water (even more if you want your flowers to be able to suck up all of the water to nourish the flower bud, rather than the leaves).
Trim the stems at an angle. Make sure the stems are supported in the vase - if a flower is too top heavy, it’ll droop, like a daisy. A way to reinforce flowers can be making a grid using tape, rubber bands, ribbons, or cushioning them with filler (or floral foam if you’re fancy).
Change out the water whenever it’s no longer clear or there’s not enough - you always want to fill your vase enough for your flowers to have a nice drink, not so much that they drown or so little that they’re thirsty, usually about 2-4 inches of water is good, depending on the size of your vase.
Keep them away from pets (also, if you have pets, always check to make sure that your flowers are not toxic to them!)
Put them in a place where you won’t forget about them, but more importantly, you’ll be able to see them and benefit from them.
Ways that arranging flowers can benefit mental health:
You’re doing something that is just for you. Not for someone else, not for productivity, not even for your social media. Just you. This reinforces the neural pathways in your brain that say, “I am deserving of good things for no reason, other than just existing and living!”
Creating a flower arrangement can regulate your physical body by grounding you in your sensations. Here, we’ll walk through the ye-olde-grounding coping skill a lot of us have memorized:
5 things you can see - Color of the flowers, shape/edges/texture of the flowers, color of the vase, shape of the vase, hue of the leaves versus the stem, hue of the center of the flower versus the petals…
4 things you can feel - Petals, stem, leaves, water running under your hand, cutting the stems, plucking off the leaves, crunching up the wrapping paper the flowers came in…
3 things you can hear - The sound of cutting the stems, the sound of the leaves hitting against each other, the water pouring into the vase….
2 things you can smell - Depends on the flowers you chose - roses, daisies, lillies, tulips…
1 thing you can taste - Please don’t eat your flowers, but maybe while you were buying your flowers, you also picked up a snack to eat while you arrange them…
A flower arrangement is a physical and tangible reminder of growth, tending, nourishment, and the beauty of seasons. Sometimes our mental health is vibrant like giant yellow sunflowers, other times it feels more like a wilted hydrangea that’s just ready to go to bed. That’s alright. That’s part of it. Sometimes we can give the hydrangea water and it’ll perk back up, and sometimes not. Sometimes we can do things to “fix” or help our mental health, and sometimes not. It’s part of it. The best we can do is take care of what we have and try again if it’s time to move on.
My hope is that this inspires you to try, or at least to add it to your list of things to try in 2026, to create your very own bouquet for just you. Colorful, vibrant, dull, muted, full, minimalist - whatever.
Arranging flowers is a practice in enjoying the process of doing something that is simply just for you and only you.