J Schwanke’s Life In Bloom

>> "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom" is brought to you by the following... >> That flower feeling.

At home.

At work.

Or anytime.

CalFlowers is a proud sponsor of "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom," where flowers and wellness go hand in hand.

>> We have fresh in all our stores, from soups and steaks and all things flour to all things flowering.

Custom fresh arrangements designed by our in-store florists at Albertsons Companies.

>> Calla lilies are the focus of this episode of "Life in Bloom."

I'll create a unique crescent-shaped bouquet, show you a couple of calla lily tricks, and we'll mix up a calla lily cocktail.

I'm J Schwanke.

Welcome to "Life in Bloom."

One of my favorite questions to ask friends, dinner guests, or even new acquaintances is, "What's your favorite flower?"

It elicits lots of different responses, which also provides a little hint for me of what this person is like.

A popular answer is frequently the calla lily.

The calla lily is certainly a stately flower.

It's more classic in construction and may even be seen as art nouveau, characterized by its sculptural, organic shape, its arching, curving lines, or sensual ornamentation.

Calla lilies were often clutched in the hands of a loved one, lying in death's repose.

In cartoons when someone died, they were always clutching calla lilies -- or, at least, that's what I remember.

Calla lilies were a favorite one of my long-time flower friend Debbie Sennett.

She inspired me to follow my passion for flower design and become a member of the American Institute of Floral Designers.

Her favorite flowers were calla lilies, and her favorite animals were penguins.

Whenever I see either, I immediately think of her.

So, today we dedicate this episode of "Life in Bloom" to the calla lily.

Let's learn more about this elegant, regal flower.

Zantedeschia is the scientific name of the calla lily, native to southern Africa.

Members of the genus are neither true lilies nor true callas.

The name of the genus was given as a tribute to Italian botanist Giovanni Zantedeschi.

Zantedeschia species are herbaceous perennial plants that come from rhizomes.

The calla lily was a favorite subject of the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

Calla lilies take the form of a solitary pseudanthium, or false flower, with a showy white or yellow spathe, a specialized petal-like bract shaped like a funnel with a yellow central finger-like spadix, which carries the true flowers.

Calla lilies are grown in commercial production for cut flowers in California, Colombia, New Zealand, and Kenya.

A wide variety of colors have been cultivated, including white, pink, coral, maroon, orange, and yellow.

Deep maroon calla lilies are often referred to as black in color.

In the garden of frost-free climates, calla lilies act like a perennial.

But in colder climates, it's treated as a tender bulb that can be stored over the winter until the following spring.

Calla lilies are also grown as a houseplant, placed in a sunny window for good results.

Almost from time immemorial, people have asked if there's a flower that exists in nature that's black in color.

There are many flowers in nature that give the impression of being black in color.

However, black flowers are not truly black, but variations of dark purple, deep burgundy, maroon, or even red.

That said, calla lilies from nature can easily create an impression of a black flower.

Calla lilies are long-lasting, too, with high moisture content, and that allows them to last longer than many other types of flowers.

Let's use some black calla lilies to create a stately gathering that can be placed in a vase and enjoyed for quite a long time.

We'll start by using our foxtail fern and then adding our calla lilies one at a time.

I'm using two bunches of black calla lilies.

This bouquet is all gathered in my hand.

Once we have everything exactly where we want it, we'll bind it together.

We'll add one full bunch of lily grass.

I like the way that this extends out of the vase and onto the table.

Our last step is a collar of variegated fatsia.

I like a big tropical leaf like this to go around the bouquet.

It basically forms a collar around the rest of the flowers.

Then we'll bind it together using craft-covered wire.

I'm going to make a nice wide band, and I'm not going to make it very tight because there's a lot of moisture in the calla lily stems.

I don't want to bind them off too tight, or they'll rot.

Once we've secured it, we can drop it down in the vase, and we're ready to enjoy the flowers.

With a couple of bunches of black calla lilies and a few pieces of foliage, we have a wonderful impression that can decorate our home.

Here's my Bloom 365 Tip -- helping you enjoy flowers all year long.

The calla lily has an amazing amount of water supply inside its stems.

Calla lilies are extremely long-lasting, and because there's so much moisture content inside the stem, you can do unusual and unique things with them.

They're great for boutonnieres.

I've even used them on projects where they've been pinned to a foam apparatus and didn't even need a water supply.

The calla lily -- a wonderful flower with a tremendous water supply.

So, we're going to create a cascade style of bouquet that's more contemporary in nature.

I picked up this great idea from a European magazine, and it's just wiring the calla lilies together.

We can make them small or large.

We're going to start with a selection of our callas, and we're going to look for one like this that's narrow and smaller than the other ones that we have.

We'll look for a couple like that.

What we're going to do is just lay them on top of one another.

This one's going to form the end of our bouquet.

We're gonna use decorative wire and just wrap those two callas together.

So then we're going to look for different sizes and shapes and start to graduate those, going up the stem so we're binding those together into one unit.

Here's the end of the first wire that I started with.

So, I laid that up the first calla and then started wrapping.

So, this is going to be concealed inside the middle of the bouquet.

And it'll ensure that it doesn't come unraveled later on.

I can even bring callas in and add them on the bottom so that we start to get that great tapered effect.

I'm choosing different calla lilies so that we're graduating in size from the tightest to the most open as we go up the stem of our bouquet.

So, we get towards the end.

You'll notice that I'm bringing these out to the side so that it makes it fatter.

But we've saved our big callas for this part.

It's okay to add more than one.

So, now it's time to line up the stems and determine what we want the handle to look like.

We're going to start to create that taper.

This is where having a really sharp knife is real important.

Then it's just about wrapping.

You can come down.

Bring it down to a diminishing point.

When you get it formed exactly where you want it, then you can go back and do a more severe wrap.

And so you can grab those stems and give them a squeeze.

Just be gentle.

Just kind of making sure you're forming it and shaping it into the crescent shape that you want.

Start to get it to a great crescent shape.

And there we've got that beautiful cascade, those gorgeous calla lilies.

We can embellish this.

I've got pearls on wire here in two different colors, a white and a chrome.

And then I also have some flat wire.

And I've got a few different types of ribbon.

So, we'll take the flat wire, cut off a length.

We're going to form the end to come out to the end of our callas.

Well, we'll wrap it around, cut it off down there.

You'll notice I'm just being real random about the way that this is actually attaching to the bouquet itself.

With a flat wire, too, if I cut it at an angle, I can insert it right into the bouquet, and then that's going affix it and hold it in place.

We use our beaded wire and, again, loosely wrap it around our bouquet.

We'll follow it up with the chrome... and then some of the silver ribbon.

Then we'll use some bullion just to make sure everything stays in place.

Take a few minutes to look at it and make sure that everything is affixed exactly how you want it and make sure that all the ends of my wire are concealed, all turned in so there's nothing to poke or catch on anything.

It's a beautiful and very modern type of bouquet because of the embellishments we've added.

But remember, it could also be very simplistic, with one type of wire.

The calla lilies are the inspiration.

That's what makes this so beautiful.

So, our flower cocktail for today is the calla lily.

We'll start with a shaker full of ice.

We'll do an ounce and a half of dry vermouth.

Then we need a half an ounce of lemon... ...half an ounce of Bndictine... ...half an ounce of Lillet Blanc... ...and just a dash of absinthe.

We shake it and serve it in a chilled flute.

Cheers.

Let's create an elegant centerpiece inside our bubble bowl using these beautiful calla lilies.

We'll start with a leaf, cut off the stem, and place it inside.

This will give a little bit of background and interest for our arrangement.

Then we'll start with our calla lilies.

We want to curve them around the inside of our bowl.

But to do that, the stems sometimes are very stiff and sturdy.

So we'll take our knife and grab the edge and peel back the skin on one side of the calla lily.

What that does is allow the calla lily to become very bendable.

We can cut the end and place it inside our bubble bowl.

We'll weave the entire bunch all around the inside of the bubble bowl.

We've positioned our stems so they're all at the bottom of the container.

So, when we add our water with flower food, it will nourish the calla lilies.

We can go back in and ensure that all of the ends of our calla lily stems are under the water.

Removing the skin on one side of the calla lily blossom does shorten its vase life.

So you won't expect these callas to last quite as long as ones in a vase would.

But it's a wonderful special effect for an elegant dinner party.

So, for this project, we're going to create a composite calla lily, taking all of these different blossoms and forming them into one giant blossom.

Our first step is to choose the perfect calla lily.

This one has a great sturdy stem, and everything looks wonderful about it.

So that'll be perfect for our center blossom.

We're just going to stabilize the stem by placing a wire directly through the stem and folding it down on either side.

We'll come in, in an opposite direction and send a wire through again and then fold those wires down.

Those four wires are going to help stabilize the stem.

We use a little bit of floral tape to cover the florist wire and attach it to the stems.

I'm going to tape all the way to the bottom of the wires themselves so that the sharp ends are concealed tightly against the stem.

Now, I can actually cut this a little bit shorter so it's going to be a little bit easier to manage.

And we'll reserve this as our center blossom.

The next step is to go through our callas.

What we're going to do is we're going to cut those off right here.

And what that does is it allows us to open up the calla lily blossom itself and remove the spadix on the inside.

So, let's get that part done first.

So, we've used about two dozen total, and now we'll just make sure that we've got all of the spadixes removed.

We'll take the calla blossoms and just lay them out on the table facedown.

That helps open up those blossoms and will make it easier for us to adhere them to the outside of the other blossom.

So, picking and choosing size now is really important.

The bigger ones like this need to go on the outside, and smaller ones like this need to go towards the interior.

We're going to connect these directly to that blossom using cold adhesive.

I would never use hot glue in this situation because the hot glue itself could be damaging to the flowers.

This cold glue works perfectly.

We'll apply glue to the outside of our interior flower, the flower that's going to be the center of our composite calla flower.

I just let it hang off the table.

Just like rubber cement, I want to make sure that it sits for a few minutes so that it starts to get tacky.

We'll start with our smallest one.

We're going to add a little bit of that glue on the inside of this, as well, again, allowing those two surfaces to get tacky, and we don't want it to roll shut on itself.

We're going to start with this one and go on the opposite side.

So, we've created a double calla blossom.

We're just going to continue to do that with all of these petals, increasing the size and shape of the composite calla.

Now we'll add Aspidistra leaves to the outside to help support the entire blossom.

This will also help us conceal our mechanics.

We use some craft-covered wire.

We'll start with the craft-covered wire running down the stems.

And then we'll wrap it around the top of the stems.

When we get to the end, we can twist the wires together, trim these up, and even up our calla lily stem.

Because the pedals themselves have a high water content, this would be a perfect bouquet for a bride for her wedding day.

Let's take a look at some flower fan mail.

Today, I have a charming and colorful arrangement to share with you from viewer Kenneth Brownson.

It's great the way you can appreciate all of the different flower types here, too.

He told me he didn't have any foliage, so he just relied on gravity with these lovely flowers he received as a gift.

Ken's stories have brought me so much joy.

Thanks for being my flower friend, Ken.

I so enjoy seeing pictures of your flower arrangements, known around here as "Schwankes," after a viewer's nickname.

Send them [email protected].

The letter J at the letter U bloom.com.

And watch for more Schwankes on upcoming shows.

I hope you've gained an appreciation for the calla lily.

Whether they are currently in bloom or not, these beautiful and truly unique flowers always make a lovely statement.

For "Life in Bloom," I'm J Schwanke.

"J Schwanke's Life in Bloom" is filmed in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

>> Visit J's web site, ubloom.com, for flower projects and crafts, complete recipes, behind-the-scenes videos, J's blog, flower cocktails, and more.

"J Schwanke's Life in Bloom" is brought to you by the following... >> That flower feeling.

At home.

At work.

Or anytime.

CalFlowers is a proud sponsor of "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom," where flowers and wellness go hand-in-hand.

>> We have fresh in all our stores, from soups and steaks and all things flour to all things flowering.

Custom fresh arrangements designed by our in-store florists at Albertsons Companies.

Closed-caption funding provided by Holland America Flowers.