Flower Arranging Trivia
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87 free Flower Arranging trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This flower arrangement trivia quiz is about the craft of putting flowers together, not the botany of the blooms themselves: ikebana and its schools, Western floral design and its seven principles, bouquets, wreaths, garlands, leis, corsages and boutonnières, the Victorian language of flowers, the great flower shows and auctions, and the florists who dressed royal weddings and coronations. The easy questions are ones most people know: what a bride does with her bouquet, which side a boutonnière goes on, and which national holiday brings a lei. From there it gets deeper: Ikenobō and the Rokkaku-dō, the kenzan pin frog, moribana and nageire, Sōfū Teshigahara's Sōgetsu credo, Constance Spry's hedgerow windows and coronation flowers, Shane Connolly's myrtle in Kate Middleton's bouquet, the Mercury Man of FTD and Interflora, the Aalsmeer auction hall, Chelsea and Philadelphia flower shows, the Advent wreath's cart-wheel origins, oshibana pressed-flower art and the Edinburgh floral clock. If you want the flowers themselves, our Flower Trivia quiz covers roses, tulips and the rest. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the schools, people, events and customs named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 87 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From Old French bosc, 'wood', bouquet first meant what?
Little wood
Little wood, or thicket: bouquet is a diminutive of Old French bosc, a cousin of the English word bush. English borrowed it for a bunch of flowers, and it later named the scent of a wine too.
Q 02In floral design, what is the term for the first thing that attracts the viewer's eye?
Focal point
The focal point is where the eye lands first and keeps returning. Designers often build it just above the container's rim, with a solid group of blooms or the strongest colour in the piece.
Q 03Which ancient people were among the first known to arrange cut flowers in vases, favouring the sacred lotus?
Egyptians
The Egyptians left the oldest evidence of flowers arranged in vases: Old Kingdom tomb reliefs and paintings show lotus blooms and buds set in bowls, the lotus being sacred to the goddess Isis.
Q 04Ikebana's three main line placements correspond to heaven, earth and what?
Humans
Heaven, humans and earth: the tallest stem stands for heaven and is traditionally cut to at least one and a half times the size of the container, and the two shorter lines are measured against it.
Q 05Ripening fruit left beside a vase can make cut flowers wilt early by giving off which gas?
Ethylene
Ethylene is a plant hormone that fruit such as bananas and apples release as they ripen. Even traces of it speed the ageing of cut flowers, which is why florists keep their stock well away from the fruit bowl.
Q 06What is the alternative name for ikebana, meaning 'way of flowers'?
Kadō
Kadō joins ka, 'flower', to dō, 'way', the ending shared by judo, aikidō and chadō, the way of tea. The name presents arranging as a discipline to be followed, not just a decoration.
Q 07Ikebana is one of Japan's three classical arts of refinement, with tea ceremony and what?
Incense appreciation
Incense appreciation, or kōdō, is the least known of the three. Guests are said to 'listen' to a sliver of fragrant wood warming on a mica plate rather than smell it, and try to tell the scents apart.
Q 08In a traditional Japanese home, ikebana arrangements were placed in which alcove?
Tokonoma
The tokonoma is a raised alcove for a hanging scroll and flowers. By custom the guest of honour is seated in front of it with their back to the display, so the most honoured person in the room is the one who cannot see it.
Q 09Which shōgun, a great patron of tea ceremony and ikebana, built Kyoto's Silver Pavilion as his retirement villa?
Ashikaga Yoshimasa
Ashikaga Yoshimasa was a weak ruler but a great patron: after passing the shogunate to his son in 1473 he built the villa that became the temple Ginkaku-ji, where tea and flower arranging flourished.
Q 10Which school of ikebana, begun by Kyoto temple priests, is the oldest?
Ikenobō
Ikenobō is the oldest school of ikebana: a Zen monk's diary for 1462 records that people of taste in Kyoto vied to see the flowers arranged by its priest Senkei.
Q 11The oldest ikebana school is based at which Kyoto temple, named for its six-sided hall?
Rokkaku-dō
Rokkaku-dō, the 'six-cornered hall', is where the school's priests made the altar flower offerings that grew into an art; the temple has been looked after by the school's own headmasters for generations.
Q 12Which tea master is said to have cut down his morning glories so that Hideyoshi would find just one, in a vase?
Sen no Rikyū
Sen no Rikyū, by the story, stripped his garden of its prized morning glories before the ruler's visit and set a single bloom in the tea room; his spare flowers for tea fed the looser styles of ikebana.
Q 13What does the ikebana term rikka mean?
Standing flowers
Q 21Ikebana International, founded in 1956 to spread the art worldwide, takes which phrase as its motto?
Friendship through flowers
Friendship through flowers: Ellen Gordon Allen founded the group so that people around the world could meet through a shared love of ikebana, and it deliberately teaches no single school's style.
Q 22Which brand of water-absorbing floral foam did the Smithers company launch in the 1950s?
Oasis
Oasis foam soaks up water and grips any stem pushed into it, so a design holds its shape while it drinks; its inventor devised it in 1953 and formed the Smithers-Oasis company a year later.
Q 23Which guild ran the Paris flower trade from 1677 to 1791?
Maîtresses bouquetières
Rikka means 'standing flowers': the style grew out of flower offerings set upright in vases on Buddhist altars and became a highly formal way of picturing a whole landscape in one vase.
Q 14In rikka arrangements, what do pine branches symbolise?
Endurance and eternity
In rikka, pine branches symbolise endurance and eternity: the evergreen pine, which keeps its needles through winter, is a classic Japanese emblem of longevity.
Q 15Nageire, an informal ikebana style, takes its name from a word meaning what?
Thrown in
Thrown in: nageire sets a long branch and a few flowers in a tall vase so that they look fresh and spontaneous, a deliberate contrast to the strict rules of the formal styles.
Q 16Which ikebana founder devised the moribana style to suit newly imported Western flowers?
Ohara Unshin
Ohara Unshin devised moribana after Japan opened to the West and European flowers began to arrive, and went on to found a school of his own; older schools later took up the style too.
Q 17What kind of container does a proper moribana design use?
A flat, shallow one
A flat, shallow one, called a suiban: it lets branches and flowers spread sideways into a small landscape, breaking with the vertical lines of the older styles that rose from tall vases.
Q 18The kenzan, a spiky flower holder sharing 'ken' with kendo, literally means what?
Sword mountain
Sword mountain: ken is the 'sword' of kendo and zan a mountain, a fair picture of the heavy base bristling with upright needles that fix a stem in place.
Q 19Which ikebana school was founded by Sōfū Teshigahara in 1927?
Sōgetsu
Sōgetsu began as a break with set forms: at a time when ikebana meant copying established patterns, Sōfū Teshigahara treated it as a creative art that anyone could practise anywhere, with any material.
Q 20Hiroshi Teshigahara, who took over his father's ikebana school in 1980, was better known as what?
A film director
A film director: Hiroshi Teshigahara made Woman in the Dunes, which brought him an Oscar nomination for directing, long before he succeeded his sister as head of the family school.
The Maîtresses bouquetières, a guild of women flower sellers chartered in 1677, controlled the Paris flower trade until French guilds were abolished in 1791.
Q 24Flower auctions use which pricing system?
Dutch clock
Flower auctions run on the Dutch clock, a descending-price system: the price starts high and drops until a buyer stops the clock.
Q 25The world's largest flower auction, run by Royal FloraHolland, is held in which town?
Aalsmeer
Aalsmeer handles so many flowers that its auction hall ranks among the largest buildings in the world by floor area, and buyers have only a few seconds to bid on each lot.
Q 26Covent Garden's wholesale flower and produce market moved in 1974 to which London district?
Nine Elms
Nine Elms took the traders in 1974 because lorries had choked the old streets; the new market rose on a former railway locomotive depot, and the emptied piazza reopened in 1980 as shops.
Q 27London's Columbia Road Flower Market opens on which day only?
Sunday
Sunday: the market began as a Saturday one, but a Sunday market was set up as the area's Jewish population grew and the Saturday trade lapsed; traders could also sell flowers left over from Saturday.
Q 28FTD began in 1910 when American florists agreed to swap out-of-town orders using which technology?
Telegraph
Telegraph: florists meeting in Rochester, New York, agreed to wire each other's out-of-town orders, so that a shop near the recipient could make the delivery. FTD first stood for Florists' Telegraph Delivery.
Q 29Which Roman god has fronted the logo of flower-delivery network FTD since 1914?
Mercury
Mercury, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods, became FTD's 'Mercury Man' in 1914, picked to promise speedy delivery; the company later named its electronic order network after him too.
Q 30The British arm of FTD, formed in 1923, adopted which name in 1953?
Interflora
Interflora became the name of FTD's British arm in 1953, thirty years after 17 UK florists first joined the American network; in 2006 FTD bought the business outright.