Buying five identical orange pumpkins is the fastest way to make a display look like a supermarket crate. A mix of shapes and colours reads as considered instead.

The Hokkaido pumpkin is the deep red-orange, squat drum shape most people picture when they hear "autumn", and it is the one to build a warm, cosy grouping around. The Turk's Turban pumpkin looks nothing like a pumpkin from a distance: its green, orange and cream turban shape is sculptural enough to work as a single statement piece rather than something you buy three of. The classic round orange pumpkin, in a 16 cm and a 19 cm size, is the familiar jack-o'-lantern shape sold whole for display rather than carving, and it is the one to put front and centre on a doorstep or at the base of a bigger arrangement.

For a moodier, more modern palette, the Black Cat and white pumpkin set pairs a near-black pumpkin with a ghost-white one, which works especially well for the Halloween week itself rather than the full autumn stretch, since the near-black one reads more Halloween than harvest. If hunting down single varieties sounds like too much effort, the three-pumpkin set and the five-pumpkin XL set do the variety-picking for you. For smaller-scale styling, the real pumpkin giftbox holds seven small ornamental pumpkins that no two look alike, which makes it a good table setting or a gift on its own, and the net bag of five natural pumpkins is useful filler for the gaps between bigger pieces.

Every display has a spot or two where a real pumpkin will not survive the season: an exposed doorstep in a wet climate, a sunny windowsill, a shelf a toddler can reach, or a bathroom. That is where the faux pumpkins earn their place. Foam pumpkins weigh almost nothing, which also makes them the right choice on top of soil or moss in a terrarium, where a real mini pumpkin's weight and moisture cause problems over time. Orange and brown twisted paper-cord pumpkins give a warmer, more textured base colour than foam and come back out of storage looking exactly the same next September. The natural three-tone set in green, orange and dark red is a ready-made colour mix for a windowsill or tray, and the wall-hanging pumpkin covers a bare stretch of wall next to a front door without needing any shelf space at all, which matters if you rent and cannot pile things on every surface.

Or skip the styling entirely

If picking varieties and working out proportions is not how you want to spend an evening, the arrangement has already been made for you. The autumn deco kit with two real pumpkins and the larger deco kit with four mini pumpkins, moss and wood cones both group real pumpkins with natural filler material at a scale that just needs unwrapping and placing, and the medium deco kit sits between the two. The autumn bowls go a step further and put everything inside a glass container, so there is nothing to arrange at all: a medium glass bowl with two pumpkins and moss, a medium bowl with five real pumpkins, a large bowl with thirteen pumpkins and flat moss, or a large bowl built around two bigger pumpkins. Every decision this page walks through, which variety, how many, what sits next to them, is already made inside the glass.