Central Park is in bloom around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but inside, the Great Hall offers some stiff competition to even the most glorious spring day. Every Monday, when the museum is closed to the public, the Met’s in-house decorator, Remco van Vliet, designs the towering floral arrangements that burst forth from the hall’s neoclassical niches.

On a recent morning, Mr. van Vliet was perched on a silver and green ladder, clippers in hand, energetically plunging dogwood branches into a 2-foot-high urn. Deftly snipping leaves and branches, he added round clumps of green blossoms — snowball viburnum — and stems of curly willow that glowed reddishbrown under the Great Hall’s lights. Eventually, he filled the vessel with nearly 200 branches, transforming piles of twigs into a carefully sculpted, 8-foot-high arrangement.

“It’s like cutting hair,” the 32-year-old Dutchman said.

Mr. van Vliet started working in the Great Hall nearly a decade ago as an assistant to the Met’s longtime event designer Chris Giftos. Now a legend in the event design field, Mr. Giftos spent 33 years at the Met, during which he made the museum a leader in floral installations.

When Mr. Giftos retired in June 2003, Mr. van Vliet and his newly formed design company, Van Vliet & Trap, took over the decorating portion of Mr. Giftos’s duties at the Met. That included designing the furniture, table settings, and flowers for dinners and parties, as well as the weekly fresh flowers in the Great Hall. A third-generation flower designer who arrived in New York from Holland at age 18 with just $400, Mr. van Vliet started out hauling boxes in Chelsea’s flower market.

The tradition of fresh flowers in the Great Hall began in 1969 with an endowment from Lila Acheson Wallace, a co-founder of Reader’s Digest and one of the Museum’s largest benefactors. Wallace, a museum trustee and an avid gardener, intended the flowers to welcome visitors to the museum, said Mr. Giftos, who worked at the landmark Madison Avenue flower shop Christatos & Koster before joining the Met in 1970.

Mr. Giftos handled the menus and wines, as well as table settings and decor for Met events, such as the annual Costume Institute Gala. But the floral arrangements in the Great Hall became his calling card.

“He was known for enormous skill and artistry and creativity,” the president of the Horticultural Society of New York, Tony Smith, said. “When you walked into the Great Hall, those enormous urns were his creation. To do one would be breathtaking, but to do six or eight … They were always glorious, always seasonal, just exuberant.”

The Met’s reputation for floral design grew— along with Mr. Giftos’s — as museums across the country began receiving endowments for fresh flowers. “The arrangements became an essential part of the Great Hall — something that people look to in the same way that they look at art,” the vice president for development and membership at the Met, Nina Diefenbach, said.

After nearly 30 years on the job, Mr. Giftos was beginning to think about retirement when he met Mr. van Vliet, then a salesman at Dutch Flower Line, a wholesale store where Mr. Giftos frequently purchased flowers. Impressed with Mr. van Vliet’s extensive knowledge of horticulture, Mr. Giftos asked him to help him at the Met one afternoon. He quickly realized that the polite, earnest young man had “the eye”— an instinctual understanding of color, style, and scale.

For the next six years, Mr. van Vliet spent his spare time training with Mr. Giftos at the Met. In 2001, Mr. van Vliet and his stepbrother, Cas Trap, started their own event company, which has gained a roster of clients including the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera. When Mr. Giftos retired, van Vliet & Trap signed a contract to become the exclusive designer for in-house events at the Met, a plum assignment for the young company.

Mr. van Vliet was no stranger to the world of design. He’d grown up making 40 hand bouquets a day in his stepfather’s flower shop in Den Helder, Holland, a city 45 minutes outside of Amsterdam. He moved to New York on August 25, 1994. “The next morning at 4 a.m., I was carrying boxes of flowers around here,” Mr. van Vliet said on a walk through the flower market, pointing to the tiny workspace above 28th Street where he used to live.

His relationships with old flower market friends have proven to be a major advantage in the design world, where access to the best materials depends on good contacts. Unlike some designers, Mr. van Vliet, or “Rem,” as he’s called in the market, seldom gets into arguments with wholesalers, according to the owner of Major Wholesale Flowers, Louis Theofanis, from whom Mr. van Vliet often buys cherry, dogwood and lilac branches for the Great Hall. “He sees what we go through,” Mr. Theofanis said. “He’s more reasonable with us than retailers who don’t know the wholesale business.”

Access to the best materials is crucial at the Great Hall because its large scale requires plant varieties that are between 8 and 10 feet tall. A rose looks “like a grain of salt” in the 13,360-square-foot space, Mr. van Vliet said. Flowering branches work best, but at certain times of the year, they are difficult to find, forcing Mr. van Vliet to rely heavily on imports, such as pink heliconia from Puerto Rico or snowball from Holland.

“You can’t just put your standard tulip into those niches,” Ms. Diefenbach said. “Remco’s very creative with the size requirements.”

She added that he has a knack for customizing flowers to their surroundings without overshadowing the museum’s collections. At a recent dinner in the museum’s new Greek and Roman galleries, she said, Mr. van Vliet skillfully evoked the classical world with potted lemon trees, custom wooden tables, and arrangements featuring ivy, bunches of grapes, and blood oranges cut in half to show their rich, red insides, matching the terra cotta pottery in the galleries.

” When you walked into the room, it was perfect,” Mr. Giftos, who helped design the dinner along with Mr. van Vliet, said of the arrangements.

He added that he’s very proud of his young protégé. “My chest is way out there.”