Houseplants Do Double Duty In This DIY Centerpiece

We're teaming up with Squarespace for a week of inventive DIY centerpieces, from classics with a twist to totally wild takes. We invited a few of our favorite designers and stylists to participate, so join us as they share their tips and tricks—and scroll down for a code to get 10% off a yearlong subscription to Squarespace.

Today: Designer Megan Pflug teaches us how to create a leafy, whimsical hanging centerpiece for your dinner table using common houseplants. Megan uses Squarespace—check out her site here.

Inspired by her favorite houseplants, Brooklyn-based home decor stylist and designer Megan Pflug dreamed up this leafy arrangement using ivy clippings, fern fronds, and begonia leaves. She tells us that when she uses common houseplants to create an arrangement, a summery green centerpiece is never out of reach.

Pflug loves finding ways to incorporate hanging arrangements into her table settings. (They leave plenty of room on the table for food and wine.) Her design is easily adapted to adorn any type of lengthy hanging object or chandelier—here, she used a copper-pipe chandelier that she made over the winter—and suggests that a small branch would work just as well.

  

First, she prepped her materials by cutting a couple of lengths of ivy off her plant and wove it around the bottom of the chandelier. "I found that the vines stayed in place on their own, but you could easily use a little bit of thin wire to help hold things in place," she explains.

Letting a few of the vines brush the tabletop created romance in the centerpiece, she adds. She then tucked 2 to 3 fern fronds into the ivy for more texture, and then finished off the look by adding begonia leaves for a little extra color.

 
And because centerpieces look better with a few friends along for the ride, here are some of Megan's favorite ways to use clippings as place settings:

Fern

 

Ivy

Photographs and videos by Biz Jones. Follow Megan at @mepflug.

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