Orange Lilies in Holiday Hearth Basket

Once you’ve prepared your bed of holiday greens for your basket (which you can do a week in advance and keep it in a cool place), the fun part begins.  Picking out your colors.  In a previous post we chose all red/rust color roses – so it was a bed of a dozen roses – quite striking.  Yesterday we chose orange lilies.  Everybody thinks of orange for Thanksgiving but orange shouts.  We need to tone things down a bit.  So we put some purple in between the other shouter, yellow, and some more mums that mix the orange and yellow for transition.  All toll the arrangement includes 3 lily stalks, one monte casino (little purple flowers), two mixed orange and yellow mums, one sunflower, one soldago, one limonium and purple mums for a total of 10 flower stalks.  Since we prepared our bed of greens so well, we stretched the number of flowers we had to use too.  A comparison of flower costs for the two baskets is a surprise – the roses cost less because you have to buy multiple packs for the mums and lilies arrangement.  The pay off with this arrangement is that you will have more flowers to put around the house.