Try the toothpick trick! 5 playful, easy ways to display hyacinths

1. Plant in a mug or pot

With its sweet, spicy fragrance, hyacinth is pleasantly easy to care for. Slip the plant—either in its original nursery pot or just its soil ball—into the container of your choice and dress the surface with moss. Place in a bright spot and water lightly a couple of times a week. If the stems stretch tall and the hyacinths start to flop, you’re watering too much. Still, don’t forget to water a budded hyacinth—the moisture helps it open its flowers. A hyacinth bought with tight buds will bloom in about a week at room temperature. For the longest display, move the plant to a cool place overnight. A hyacinth can even cope with a touch of frost, around −1 to −2 °C (30–28 °F).

2. Roll into a kokedama

As a bulb plant, hyacinth is easy to shape into a kokedama—a moss ball. You can buy sheet moss from florists or gather it from nature with the landowner’s permission. Brush off excess soil from the base of the bulb and set the bulb, with its coiled roots underneath, on top of the moss. Secure the moss around the bulb with thin floral wire or string, wrapping in different directions so the ball holds together. If you’d like to hang the kokedama, for example in front of a window, leave a suitably long tail of string near the top of the bulb to hang it. Or set the kokedama on a plate. Mist regularly.

3. Set a hyacinth in a hyacinth vase

In a clear vase, you can admire the hyacinth’s white, threadlike roots lengthening day by day. Rinse the bulb and roots clean and lower the hyacinth into a hyacinth vase, roots first. Add water so the surface sits just below the bulb. Top up as the level drops.

4. Fix with toothpicks on a wide plate

Clean the soil off the hyacinths and turn them into the star of your table by arranging them on a decorative plate or tray. Help the bulbs stay upright by fastening them to one another with thin toothpicks. Add a little water to the roots, or mist them daily.

5. Enjoy them as cut flowers

Hyacinth looks lovely as a cut flower, too. Snip an overly long flowering stem and place it in water, or pick up cut hyacinths from the florist—the range of varieties grows year by year.