Fluffing some daisies in a vase is easy. Creating masterpieces from large, colorful tropical flowers can be daunting. Tropicals are sensational, but they're also strange, incongruous, and big—scary big. Anyone who would master the challenging art of arranging such glorious flora is well advised to learn from a master.

Valerie Spalding of Maui has made a profession of tropical arrangements for 25 years. She’s done everything from “just watering the plants,” to arranging tropical showpieces for the Grand Wailea Resort and Spa. These days she handles a single commercial account, the Haliimaile General Store.

Spalding works in her tack room, surrounded by buckets of fresh flowers both inside and out on the länai. She moves quickly and deftly, meanwhile issuing clipped, unfinished sentences. On a recent day, she began by placing a pair of identical, two-foot-tall, straight clear-glass cylinders on her workbench. A submerged pineapple at the bottom of one vase immediately caught the visitor’s attention. It was a whole pineapple fruit, healthy green top and all, happily submerged.

"Clean cut," she said while slicing through a wrist-thick heliconia stem. (She uses a neatly forged, all-steel shears from Japan. The Japanese make the best, she says.) "The more little hairs you have coming off the stem…. he faster the water gets…." She started peeling the extra husks off the heliconia stem, the way you would with a head of celery, then began wedging the stem studiously and strongly into the vase behind her underwater pineapple.

Spaulding lined the companion vase with a crossed pattern of green and cream lines, creating a checkerboard of foliage behind the gleaming glass.The checkerboard effect, she said, is simply a matter of cutting variegated lauhala (hala leaves) into two-foot lengths and making a square of simple criss-cross weavings, then curling this mat and sliding it into the vase. To create the stout midrib, she instructed: "Run it over the edge of the table a little bit. Make it softer." Then she held up a monstera leaf, blackish green with natural (but surgically clean) cut-outs and holes. "If not lauhala, use this or ti leaves,” she said. “Roll them right up inside your glass."

Building upon these two foundations, Spaulding added a riot of different flowers. "Orchids, heliconias, and anthuriums are pretty much what I use,” she explained. “ A lot of ginger, too. That's about it." She likes such flowers because they stand up to one-week-plus of intense restaurant exposure. (It helps to live in the middle of a floriculture region. However, with today's speedy shipping systems, you can order almost any flower any day of the year.)

Her process, she admits, is largely intuitive at this point. She describes her typical creative workflow this way"I get the flowers, then I look at the vases. But I don't really have a set…. I just play with it."

But if only by example, Spaulding does provide some useful pointers for the novice. Watching her at work, the observer immediately notes some principles that any would-be arranger can emulate. Spaulding started with the stoutest, most vertical pieces—the heliconias, then some "shaker ginger," which looks like a big rattlesnake tail. Before placing them, she sprayed the scarlet, boat-like heliconia flowers with leafshine, an oily stuff that transforms the naturally waxy surface into gleaming enamel. (She uses the Pokon brand from Holland.) Once the tallest pieces were set, she added plume-like stems of minute butter-yellow orchids, tucking them into the crown of the pineapple. "Tropicals I like. It's a nice, clean line. Just try to keep it clean. Don't busy it up with lots of greens. Decide what your tallest piece is, and kind of go with it."

Yet Spaulding resists stating her principles in any set verbal formula. "Design?” she mused. “Not really. You start with the height. You just kind of go with it. It's like everything else—you can't force it."

For both arrangements she put a lot of final-touch attention on the central spot, right at the brink of the vase. With the pineapple vase, she spent minutes trying various green anthuriums, getting them to hang angled over the rim. For the checkerboard vase she chose a small heliconia to sit like a shield, front and center. "Gives it a focal point. Gives it a little pop." Then she sprayed everything with puffs of water from a surprisingly dainty-looking hand-held mister.

Both arrangements were complete in less than 30 minutes. "The hardest part was making the vase," she said.

The results were delightful, even if – to Spaulding – inexplicable. "People ask me, so do you look at magazines to get your ideas? I say, what magazine is there? What book can you look in? There's no book. I just go for it. I just like to do it. That's neither good or bad. That's just the way it is."

If Spaulding’s spontaneous aesthetic offers any guideline, then beauty – even complex, tropical arrangements – remains squarely in the eye, and the creativity, of the arranger.