If you love tulips and wish the season for displaying fresh tulips in your home decor lasted longer, here are 10 ways to style faux tulips for a realistic look.
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Why use faux tulips
I love to create fresh flower arrangements in my home, and tulips are among my favorite flowers. Spring is the time of year for tulips, but the season is short, and real tulips are only available for about a month. Since they’re beautiful throughout the spring and into the summer, I’ve started using artificial tulips in my home decor. There is also a cost savings to using faux tulips—buying fresh flowers every week gets expensive! While there is an initial investment, faux tulips can be used over a longer period each season and for years to come.
Which faux tulips are best?
I prefer real touch tulips, because they are the highest quality and look the most realistic. White tulips are my favorite. Purple is a close second, and pink tulips follow. My purple tulips have a very realistic stem, but the base of the stem is not very bendable. My white, pink and coral tulips all have bendable stems. I like having both options when styling tulips. I’ll link them at the end of this post.
Styling tips for a realistic look
It’s easy to plop a bunch of faux tulips in a vase, but here are some tips and tricks to make them look like the real deal.
1. A glass vase with water
I have a favorite glass vase for arranging fresh flowers. It’s simple, but it has a great shape with a mouth that is just the right width. I often use it as a vessel for fresh tulips. When fresh tulips are not available, use your glass vase and add some water to give the appearance that your faux blooms are real. This works well with tulips that have a realistic stem. These real touch tulips are the best I have found, and they come in multiple colors.
Tip: Use a flower frog with faux tulips just as you would with real flowers. I’ve linked mine at the end of this post.
2. Drooping tulips in a vase
Real tulips tend to droop after awhile. There are tricks to keep them standing straight, but I actually think they’re prettier and more interesting when they droop. Faux tulip stems are often bendable, allowing you to create a lifelike “droop” when you style your tulips. This works best when the mouth of your vase is narrower than the base.
3. A charming pitcher
Tulips work well with any home decor, but I think they have an old fashioned charm when placed in a pretty pitcher. They look good standing tall or spilling over the spout. Faux tulips are a great option if you have an antique pitcher that might not fare well when holding water for several days.
4. A tulipiere
I did a little research and found that tulipieres originated during the Dutch Golden Age as a way to display prized tulips, which were a symbol of wealth and luxury. Today, they are used to display cut flowers, often with single stems placed in each spout. The faux tulips in my tulipiere are on the smaller size, so I placed two stems in each spout. These vases are great if you want to display tulips in narrow spaces where a traditional floral arrangement would not fit. I enjoy decorating my kitchen windowsill for the seasons, and the narrow tulipiere is perfect for this space. It would also work well on the back of a stove or as a pretty backdrop to decor placed along a kitchen counter.
5. In a cachepot
I’ve bought real potted tulips and placed them in a cachepot on my counter before planting them outside. I love this look and thought I could reproduce it with faux tulips. I cut a piece of floral foam to fit the bottom of my cachepot. A tight fit works best. Then, I simply poked the stems through the foam and topped with dried moss. My first instinct was to spread the blooms evenly throughout the pot, but this didn’t create a realistic result. I studied a photo of real tulips in this same cachepot and realized that the blooms were in clusters with several blooms clumped together. Once I rearranged them in groups, they looked much more realistic.
6. Added to a real floral arrangement
This is a great idea if some flowers in your real arrangement fade sooner than others. Simply remove the withered flowers and replace them with faux tulips. You might have to do a bit of rearranging, but this will extend the life of your arrangement and give it a fresh look. I used a flower frog in this arrangement.
7. In a basket
I fill a basket on the inside of my front door with seasonal blooms. A vase placed inside a basket can turn it into a beautiful vessel for real flowers. When the basket is hanging on a door, faux is a better option in order to avoid spills. The blooms spilling out of the basket look cheerful and charming. Real touch tulips with bendable stems work best.
When faux is best
The next several ideas might not fool anybody into believing your tulips are real, but they offer beautiful tulip decor that can’t be achieved with real blooms.
8. In a bowl
I love to fill a bowl with tulip blooms hanging over the side. Bendable stems work best for round bowls. Oblong bowls would be great vessels for faux tulips with the stiffer, more realistic stems. Dough bowls work great for this application.
9. Tied with a bow and placed on a book
This is another charming look for displaying tulips in your home decor. They are a pretty addition to a vintage vignette. I placed this bunch on a book on my dining room buffet. The stems are bent and tucked behind the book.
10. Added to a wreath
A tired spring wreath gets a facelift with the addition of some faux tulips. This is a great place to use tulips in vibrant colors. Bendable stems work best. They can be tucked in and wound around other elements in your wreath in order to keep them in place. I try not to cut the stems so that I can use them in flower arrangements later once I tire of the wreath. If you are creating a wreath that you want to use for years to come, you might want to snip the stems with wire cutters and hot glue them into your wreath to make them more permanent.
There can never be too many tulips!
Do I still buy real tulips during the couple of weeks they’re available? Absolutely! But the charm of this beautiful flower will live on when I incorporate faux blooms into my home decor.
Click the photos, below, to shop my favorite faux tulips.
2 Responses
These are some terrific ideas, Erin! While I use several of these already, i learned some additional tips from you like clumping together ‘planted’ tulips to make them look more realistic!👍👍 great article, thanks!🌷🌷🌷
I’m glad you learned a little something, Beverly! The “planted” tulip look required a bit of trial and error, but clumping them really does add to the realistic look. Thank you for reading!