I’ve started incorporating succulents into my home décor over the past couple of years (artificial ones as I can’t be trusted to keep any indoor plant alive!) So creating a tabletop Christmas tree out of succulents seemed like a great addition! And it wasn’t too hard to make – it just required a little planning and prep. Oh, and lots of succulents. So here are my step-by-step instructions to recreate your own gorgeous artificial succulent centerpiece.
First, here are the supplies you will need.
- Cone shaped floral foam – The one I used is about 18″ tall and 4.75″ in diameter. Keep in mind the size of the foam influences how many succulents you will need. (https://amzn.to/2IBBZzp)
- Artificial succulents – I used 104.5 (more on the 0.5 later). They were a mixture of types, sizes and colors. I purchased 6 different sets of 4 types (so 2 sets of 2 each and 2 sets of 1 each).
- Set of 35 succulents (1 set): https://amzn.to/377kEIN
- Set of 16 succulents (2 sets): https://amzn.to/3j3Bjz9
- Different set of 16 succulents (1 set): https://amzn.to/34XGKL6
- Set of 11 succulents (2 sets): https://amzn.to/34ZXXUk
- Wire cutters – I used 1 pair with a sharper nose so I could pre-drill holes for some of the bigger stems and 1 pair that’s better for actually cutting floral stems.
- Pot – I repurposed an existing pot from an artificial plant I no longer use.
Once you have the appropriate supplies, here’s how to actually create the tree.
First – figure out how you will stick the floral foam in your pot. I knew when purchasing mine that it was the same diameter as the pot, though I did have to “shave” off a bit of the bottom to stick it in. But once in, it was sturdy without anything else. If your pot is a different size, you could purchase a second piece of foam in a disc or block shape to stick in the pot and then use a skewer to attach the cone to the foam in the pot.
Second – give some thought to how you want to lay out the succulents. I organized mine roughly by size and type and then created rows of how I wanted to place them on the foam. In reality, they didn’t go on as strict rows, but it provided a rough idea to make sure I had appropriate spacing of size, type and color.
Third – its time to place them in the foam! My method was to place the bigger succulents for the first couple of “rows” to figure out spacing and then fill in between with the medium and smaller succulents. I continued this all the way up to the top.
There were few lessons I learned, such as I should have spread out the larger succulents a bit more (I corrected for this towards the end of my project). Also, I learned that I needed more “filler” pieces so I actually cut up some of the pieces so I could better fill in gaps. This includes using pieces that came in my sets that I didn’t think I’d want to use (like the long, drapey ones, which actually worked perfectly as filler after I cut them up into smaller pieces…hence the 0.5 piece). I wound up using 104.5 pieces, with only a partial piece of one left over.
I love the result and can’t wait to decorate with it this holiday season. If you’d like see the full video tutorial, check out the video below.. Happy holidays!
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