DecorBook Classic : Fresh or Faux Flora?

Do you dream of picking an armload of summery garden flowers to arrange in bouquets around your rooms? Here's to all of you who maintain beautiful gardens. For those of us who don't have gardens, we can still bring that needed life into a room. I just took a quick look around my rooms -there's a plant or flowers in each. I'd love to have the luxury of buying fresh flowers for every room but recent allergies prevent that. Plus, it's expensive. Luckily, newer faux flowers look and feel real plus they are affordable. I can't believe I am writing about fake flowers and plants but let's take a look.

My faux choices for my bedroom and bath this spring. Turns out, the peonies were a bit bright so I'll save them for another project. Each of these stems was purchased at TJMaxx for under $16.

Here's how the ranunculus look in my bathroom. Even the leaves and the mossy stems feel real. I also added a few stems of faux olive tree branches.

Imitation succulents are less expensive than real yet look as good. In the bottom photo, my collection of old Chinese ginger jars hold succulents gathered over the years, mainly from IKEA.

For years, I bought fresh forsythia every spring in memory of my mom. After a few years, I gave up as they quickly get very messy.

I finally bought artifical stems at Michaels. I haven't used them for years but that's another nice thing about faux as it's easily stored.

Every summer, I used to buy real ferns for this sunroom urn and its sister. The maintenance - water, mist, trim, pick off dead pinnules (I had to google that last word - that's a leaf on a fern sword) seemed like a full-time job.

The solution was four small pots of IKEA paper ferns crammed in for a natural look and zero maintenance.

Peonies or maybe camellias - fresh or faux?

Hydrangeas with citrus on a kitchen island. While these are real, faux stems can be put in water, along with real citrus.

The beauty of faux is that it stays frozen in time and are less expensive than buying bouquet after bouquet of real flowers. The beauty of fresh is that you watch a living thing - from opening buds to petals gradually dropping - all beautiful stages of life. Isn't it nice we have viable choices to bring joy into our rooms ? Enjoy your Sunday and don't forget to smell the roses!