Ina Garten's Simple Trick To Instantly Upgrade Any Flower Bouquet

Ina Garten, the beloved celebrity chef of "Barefoot Contessa" fame, knows more than a few things about hosting and creating beautiful floral displays and arrangements. So when she gives advice on floral design, it's probably worth taking it seriously. Especially when the advice aligns with well-known art and landscaping principles. That's the case with a suggestion she shared on Instagram, where she noted that if she's using multiple different colors of the same flower, her secret for arranging them "is to follow the rule of odd numbers: three or five of each color always looks best."

Garten is far from the first to notice that odd numbers of objects tend to look good in displays. This "rule of odds" is recommended for everything from basic garden design with landscape plants to drawings and paintings. One explanation for this is that when there are an odd number of objects in a display, your brain can't pair them up, and this allows you to create a focal point. This makes your bouquet look more dynamic and interesting. While Garten applies this specifically to using odd numbers of similarly colored flowers when creating an arrangement of all the same species of blooms, it can be useful advice for constructing a variety of bouquets, including those with a mix of different flower types. 

There are a range of ways you can use the rule of odds when creating bouquets from your garden flowers. Ina Garten showed a group of stunning blue and white hydrangea blooms to demonstrate her point in her Instagram post, and you, too, can easily use this technique to make a hydrangea display. Since hydrangeas come in a variety of colors and big-leaf hydrangea flowers can change color based on soil acidity, creating groups of three or five of each hue in a vase will provide you with a stunning arrangement in no time.

You can also create mixed arrangements with this method by using a few different common flowers for bouquets. For example, you could combine five white hydrangeas with three large sunflowers and three bunches of ornamental grass, all from your beautiful cut flower garden. You might be surprised how many unique and beautiful creations you can make using the rule of odds.

Don't forget to change the water in your arrangement every few days to ensure the longest vase life possible. You can also add a small amount of bleach to the vase to prevent bacterial growth.