Glass Vase Ideas for When Youre Done With Flowers

I counted them once, out of curiosity more than anything, because a student had asked me why my classroom windowsill had four vases with nothing in them and I didn’t have a good answer at the time. Fourteen. Fourteen glass vases in one triple decker apartment, and on the day I counted, exactly one had flowers in it, and those flowers were dead and I hadn’t noticed for four days, which tells you something about how much attention flowers were actually getting in this house.

The rest were doing other jobs. A tall cylinder one was holding wooden spoons by the stove. A squat round one, the kind that comes free with a bouquet from the grocery store and you keep out of guilt, had a candle sitting in about an inch of sand from a beach trip I can no longer place the year of. Another was empty and just sitting in the window because the light comes through it in a particular way at around four in the afternoon in November, which is the one month this apartment does anything right by way of natural light, so I let it have its moment.

I think we’ve all been sold the idea that a glass vase has one job, and it’s flowers, and once the flowers are gone the vase goes into a cupboard to wait for the next occasion.

That’s not been my experience of owning them. Flowers are expensive, they die on a schedule I can never predict, and in a building this old, they also seem to attract a specific kind of small flying insect that I have decided not to think too hard about. So the vases stayed out and I started using them for everything else, mostly by accident, and eventually on purpose.

This isn’t a piece about flower arranging. It’s about what actually goes into a glass vase in a house where the flowers keep dying before you remember to buy more, and where half the point of having clear glass around is that it does something with light in a room that gets less of it than a hundred and thirty year old building really should. Some of what follows is decorative. Some of it is frankly just storage that looks better than it has any right to. All of it has lived in my house long enough that I trust it.

[Glass Vases]

Dried and Foraged Things That Don’t Need Water

The first non-flower thing I ever put in a vase was a fistful of bare branches from a tree in the backyard that had come down in a storm, mostly because I didn’t want to just throw them out and they were sitting by the back door looking mournful. That was maybe six years ago and I still have some of the same branches. That’s the appeal, once it clicks. No water, no wilting, no going out to buy more because you forgot again.

Since then it’s been pampas grass one winter (everyone had it, I know, I caved), dried eucalyptus that I actually grew myself in a pot on the fire escape and hung upside down in the closet until it went that faded sage color, and one very tall vase in the front hall that’s held the same three branches of curly willow since a Thanksgiving I can’t remember the year of either. My sister came to visit last spring, looked at that vase, and asked, completely deadpan, whether I’d forgotten to throw those out. I had not forgotten. That was the whole point.

Bunny tail grass is the one I’d actually push you toward if you’re starting from nothing, because it’s cheap, it dries itself if you just leave it alone in a vase with no water at all, and it doesn’t shed the way pampas does, which matters if you’ve ever vacuumed pampas fluff out of a rug and sworn at it under your breath. Seed pods work too, the big flat ones from money plant, silver and papery and completely weightless, which means you want a heavier vase underneath them or the whole thing tips if a window’s open and the draft catches it. I learned that one on a genuinely windy Tuesday and I’m not doing it again.

[Dried and Foraged Fillers]

The Kitchen Ones Nobody Admits Are Vases

I have three vases that live by the stove and have never once held a flower, and if you asked me to call them anything other than vases I couldn’t, because that’s what they are, bought as vases, repurposed within about a week of owning them. One holds wooden spoons and a whisk. One holds spatulas. The tallest one, which is actually a bud vase that came with a bouquet from a colleague’s retirement party, holds exactly four long matches for the gas stove, which is the kind of specific, slightly odd household fact I didn’t know I’d have opinions about until I moved into a place with a gas stove that needed manual lighting half the time.

The reason this works better than a proper utensil crock is mostly about light and cleaning. Glass shows you the water line if you’ve put wet spoons in there, which means you actually rinse it out instead of letting something grow at the bottom that you’d rather not think about. A ceramic crock hides that. I found out the difference the hard way with a ceramic one that got passed down from my mother and sat there for probably three months longer than it should have before I properly cleaned it.

The other benefit, and this one surprised me, is that clear glass by a stove doesn’t visually add clutter to a kitchen the way a solid crock does, because your eye reads straight through it to the tile behind. My kitchen is small, narrow, the kind of galley layout this building was clearly built around servants rather than convenience, and anything that doesn’t visually take up space is doing real work in there, not just looking nice.

[Kitchen Storage Vases]

Candles, Because a Vase Is Just a Hurricane Lamp That Doesn’t Know It Yet

The house incident that got me here was an ice storm two winters ago that took the power out for about eleven hours, which in a hundred and thirty year old triple decker with radiators that need electricity to circulate anything is a genuinely cold eleven hours. I had exactly two proper candle holders in the whole apartment and about nine glass vases, so the vases became candle holders, fast, with a layer of sand from that same unplaceable beach trip in the bottom of each one to keep things stable.

It worked better than I expected. A taper candle stood up in two inches of sand inside a straight sided vase throws light in every direction because the glass isn’t frosted or colored, it just gets out of the way and lets the flame do the work. I’ve kept doing it since, minus the emergency, because it turns out a single thick pillar candle sitting directly in an empty vase, no sand needed for a pillar, gives you almost the same effect as a proper hurricane lamp for a fraction of the price of buying an actual hurricane lamp.

The one warning, and I say this as someone who teaches middle schoolers and should really know better about supervision: never leave a taper burning down in sand you haven’t checked in a while, because the wax pools and the whole thing gets hotter at the base than the glass around it is built to handle. I cracked one vase this way, a hairline crack right up the side, discovered the next morning, not dramatic, no fire, just a slightly betrayed feeling that a piece of glass I liked had quietly given up overnight.

[Candle Vases]

Small Collected Things, Layered Rather Than Arranged

This is the category I resisted longest because it sounded, on paper, exactly like the kind of interiors advice that means nothing, “put objects in a vase,” thanks, very helpful. But it’s the section I use the most now, so here’s what I actually mean by it.

Shells from a beach trip, actual ones, not bought ones, sitting loose in the bottom third of a wide, short vase on the bookshelf. Corks from wine, which sounds like the setup to a joke about how much wine I drink and I’m not going to defend myself on that point, filling a narrower vase almost to the top, which does something oddly satisfying with the light, all those pale curved shapes stacked against each other. Pinecones in winter, which I gather on dog walks around the neighborhood and which last approximately forever if you don’t bring them in somewhere too warm right away.

The trick I had to learn, because my first attempts looked like a junk drawer emptied into glass, is that one material per vase reads as intentional and three materials in one vase reads as clutter you haven’t dealt with yet. Shells in one, corks in another, pinecones in a third, grouped together on the same shelf, looks like something. All three mixed in one vase looks like you gave up halfway through tidying.

[Objects and Collected Fillers]

Empty, on Purpose, in the One Window That Earns It

The last category is the one I was most surprised to end up defending, which is nothing. An empty vase, or one with an inch of water and absolutely nothing else in it, sitting in a window where the afternoon light comes through at an angle. I have exactly one window in this apartment that does this properly, the one facing west in the front room, and for about forty minutes most afternoons a plain glass vase there throws a pale, wobbly line of light across the floorboards that I genuinely look forward to.

It sounds like nothing to describe and it is, in a sense, nothing, but it’s the one use of a glass vase that has nothing to do with what’s inside it and everything to do with what the glass itself is doing to the light passing through. A colored vase, cobalt or pale green, does something slightly different here too, casting a tint rather than a clear line, and I’ve got one amber one that turns that same forty minutes of light almost gold.

None of this required buying anything. It required noticing which window in a drafty old building was actually worth the attention.

[Empty and Light Catching Vases]

Final Thoughts

None of this started as a plan. It started as fourteen vases and one set of dead flowers I hadn’t noticed for four days, and it turned into wooden spoons, dried branches from a storm, candles that got me through an ice storm with the power out, shells from a beach I can’t place the year of, and one window that does something with light for about forty minutes a day that I’d genuinely miss if it stopped.

The flowers still happen occasionally, don’t get me wrong, I’m not staging some kind of protest against cut flowers. But the vases outlast them by months and years, and a piece of glass that’s only allowed to hold flowers is a piece of glass sitting empty most of the time, in a cupboard, doing nothing, in a house that has enough problems with things doing nothing when they should be earning their space, heat included.

So if you’ve got a vase or six sitting in a cabinet waiting for the next bouquet, take it out. Put spoons in it. Put a candle in it and hope you don’t need it the way I did. Put nothing in it and see what the light does. It’ll survive all of that considerably better than it survives another week of flower water going cloudy on your kitchen counter, and honestly, so will you.