Our Favorite Fall Stems This Year

We’ve been talking a lot about fall decorating lately. Our approach is more about creating a feeling — the one you get when the sun goes down earlier and you turn on the lamps and light a candle. For a room to actually feel like fall, it needs warm light, deeper color, and texture all working at once. Join our free Fall Styling Challenge

There are plenty of ways to bring texture into a room this time of year — wool blankets, velvet pillows, leather boxes — but faux stems might be our favorite. In summer, big fluffy hydrangea blooms keep everything feeling light and airy. In fall, you want crisp leaves in muted colors. Something that says things are changing and slowing down inside just like they are outside.

So, here’s how we actually style them so they look real instead of like fake flowers, where we buy them, and the ones we keep coming back to.

P.S. If you’re looking for more fall decorating tips, join our Fall Styling Challenge while it’s open!

Faux Turning Maple Branch | Entry Sources

Faux Rust Leaf Branch | Dining Room Sources

How to make faux stems look real

If you have ever pulled stems out of the packaging, dropped them in a vase, and wondered why yours never looked like the ones in the photo, it’s almost never the stem.

Separate and bend every branch

After unboxing, pull the leaves and branches away from each other and bend the branches so they’re not all facing the same direction or sitting at the same angle. Nothing in nature grows in a fan. This one step is what makes fake flowers read as organic instead of manufactured.

Anchor them with floral foam

To get your stems to lean a certain direction, add floral foam to the bottom of the vase to hold them in place. This is especially helpful if you’re going for the look of a few sparse branches in a single vessel — without an anchor they’ll always slump back to center.

Bend the bottoms instead of cutting them

Instead of clipping stems down to the height of the vase, we bend the bottom portion back up to the height we need. That keeps them long enough to move to a taller vase later, which matters more than you’d think when you’re restyling a mantel in December.

When in doubt, buy the longer size

Since you can always shorten a stem by bending the bottom back, length gives you options a shorter stem never will.

Faux Rusted Quince Stem | Kitchen Sources

Budget faux fall stems (and the high-end ones they’re copying)

Faux stems can get pricey, especially if you’re buying enough to fill a large vase. But a good stem is timeless — it’s made to look like something from nature, and nature isn’t going out of style. Most of ours we’ve had for years and pull out season after season, which makes the cost feel a lot more reasonable.

That said, there are some great options if you’re shopping on a budget. A lot of what we find on Amazon are Double Takes for the more expensive versions out there. These plum stems are ones I use every year (pictured in the Bonus Room below), and this Amazon version looks nearly identical — a pack of six for less than a single stem of the original. Same story with these berry stems I use almost year-round: a pack of eight for $55 on Amazon versus $28 per stem for the originals. I’ve bought both and held them up side by side, and I honestly can’t tell the difference.

Faux Plum Cimicifuga | Bonus Room Sources

If fall decorating is on your list this month, these are the stems we keep coming back to. Shop them all here:

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