In our advice column, Ask the Strategist, we take your most burning shopping questions and scour friends, call up experts, and draw from personal experience to answer them. As always, please comment with one of your own — we’re here to help.
Question: Now that it’s, hopefully, finally getting warmer on the East Coast, I’m starting to look for some vases for spring plants and flowers. Any suggestions?
In fact we do. While we’ve got this older post about vases that’ll make even the cheapest bodega flowers look great, I’ve collected some newer options below.
Brightly colored flowers will really pop in this darker vase, that’s also made for a single stem.
This black-and-white ceramic bottle vase looks great with our favorite never-needs-to-be-watered flower, the billy ball.
I’ve written about this Tom Dixon vase before, but I couldn’t not include it here.
I’m a big fan of this Alvar Aalto vase, which celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2016. For that celebration, Iittala came out with the vase in an emerald green that’s hard to come by now, but I found one left at Yoox.
I love the way flowers can kind of hang across this long horizontal vase. You can also cut them short and line them up for a more orderly look.
This mouth-blown smoky vase has a nice ripple effect. It would look good with a little succulent, too.
An eye-catching shape in a high-gloss black to make sure your flowers are the center of attention.
If you’re more into metal, here, a set of three brass vases.
A couple weeks ago, New York Magazine photographer Bobby Doherty strolled by my desk to chat about how he’s really into vases and flowers where you can see the bulbs, as pictured above. With these vases, the water goes in the sphere on the bottom and the bulb sits right on top, soaking it in and growing into a flower. You can buy a single bulb, watch the whole stem grow into a flower, and enjoy the circle of life asserting itself right before your very eyes. Best to buy these in the spring when the flower part will actually start to bloom.
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