When it comes to creating floral designs that feel lush, airy, and nature-inspired, the most important factor is the flower recipe. I remember when I first started out in floral design how I would go to the flower market and gather all kinds of inspiring flowers and colors, only to bring them back to my little garage studio to discover that they were all big, heavy, showy blooms that looked clunky when I tried composing them together. This was when I realized, just as it is with baking or cooking, how important it was to have a flower recipe to guide my selections.
Early on, I used to feel dismayed by my arrangements because I didn’t know how to select flowers that would create balance and harmony together, and so I set about sorting out a method for creating flower recipes with ease that would come together as lush and airy and inspiring.
When choosing flowers, I use a method I’ve developed over the years to guide me, which is as follows:
First: COLOR & STYLE
I always begin selecting flowers first by color. If I'm designing just for me, I'll select what calls to me, but if I'm designing for others, I go for colors that begin to tell my client's story in the language of flowers. Ask yourself: What colors convey the feeling you want to evoke? What is the style or mood of your design or of the occasion for which you are designing? Color has so much to do with the feel flowers emote and invite. Learn more about color in my post on The Healing Energetics of Flowers and also in my post about Color Theory & Favorite Floral Color Palettes.
Second: SEASONALITY
Seasonal flowers are always going to be the healthiest, the most full of life, often easier to source, less overpriced, and longer-lasting than most out-of-season imported flowers. While it’s not always possible to do this to a T, it’s a helpful guideline for making selections and decisions. Even if you are having flowers shipped, selecting varieties that are in season for your event or occasion (or personal design practice) will be the healthiest, hardiest, and the most full of vital energy.
Third: FUNCTION (the secret sauce)
When it comes to creating flower recipes that produce lush, airy, and nature-inspired floral arrangements, my most important recommendation is to select flowers by their functions. A flower's "function" is what it "does" in the arrangement, what role it plays or what elements it contributes to the overall design.
This is how we start to differentiate between and select among the myriad of varieties of flowers. You've already filtered for the color, style, and season, but now we need to select a collection of varieties that will create a naturalized harmony together, and that will allow you to craft an intriguing, balanced, and intentional design when you compose them into an arrangement together.
Flower functions can fall into four general categories to guide your recipes. I make sure to have at least one flower variety, and often more than one, from each category to make a lush and airy recipe:
01 Focal Flowers — flowers with a distinct center that draw your eye into a point of interest
02 Filler Flowers (textures) — bushy, bloomy, frilly, full options that bring fullness and give coverage for your mechanics
03 Foliages or Blooming Foliages (structure & gesture) — light leafy or blooming stems that give shape and gesture to your arrangement
04 Floaty Flowers — airy, delicate, dancy flowers that can float over other heavier flowers and elements in the arrangement
Each flower is able to add variety and harmony to a composition: to draw the viewer’s eye into a point of focus, to ground the arrangement with texture, or to give direction and gesture. Picture a meadow or stretch of nature where you've observed flowers growing. Imagine the ways flowers in nature layer and dance as breezes breathe through.
As you get the hang of this, ask yourself with each flower you encounter: How does this flower function? What effect does it create in an arrangement? What role does it play in a composition of flowers?
Fourth: BLOOM STAGES
One of the pitfalls I encountered early on in my floral practice was feeling like my arrangements were heavy and unnatural, and this is something that many of my students and mentees ask me about now. What I realized early on was that beyond needing a variety of shapes, sizes, and functions of flowers for the arrangement, for my arrangement to feel lush and airy and like something that magically grew that way, I also needed to look at the stages of development of the blooms I use.
When you think of a blooming meadow, or even a garden, you see a variety of flowers, and a variety of shapes and sizes (and stages of a bloom's evolution) growing in harmony together. Even just on one plant, you will see fully open blooms, blooms that are still a bud or blossom, and blooms that are past their prime and dropping petals or going to seed. The variety is what conveys the harmony of nature's cycles and growth patterns, and incorporating that sensibility is a deeply impactful tool for your design work.
Fifth: A COMPARABLE BLUEPRINT
As a poet, I have always found composing floral arrangements to be similar to composing poetry. In writing poetry, we use words, images, sounds, rhymes and internal rhymes (musicality), and resonance (echoes and repetitions that give the experience of the poem depth). Together these kinds of tools, each charged with intention and impact, weave together to create a little world that, by reading it, a person gets to enter and experience.
In poetry we use words, lines, line breaks, stanzas, repetitions, musicality, and resonance to build experiences and meaning. As a professor of English, I used to teach my college students to consider a poem like an invitation into an experience, a little map of cues and clues that invite you into the poem, and into yourself, where you can feel and remember and be moved.
Floral arrangements are also compositions of intentional elements, vividly charged with beauty and emotion, that also invite you into an experience that enables anyone who beholds them to feel, to remember, and to be moved as well.
Whether this example from my background in poetry & creative writing speaks to you, or it stirs a connection between your floral design work and another field of art you know well (perhaps painting, music, or dance), looking to another art form you study and know well will give you creative inspiration and guidance for your composition process with flowers too.
Enjoy implementing these tools into your floral practice! You will feel the difference in your work immediately. And when you're ready to expand your skills and knowledge further, head into the Poetry of Flowers, my online education courses in holistic floral design, where you can explore the All-Access Poetry of Flowers Membership (get access to all Poetry of Flowers course bundles & community) or select from my Poetry of Flowers à La Carte Courses (choose a topic of your choice and go deep), from Bouquet Designs to Centerpiece Designs, to Foam-Free Floral Installations Design, and more.
Be well, and keep blooming,
XX
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Cover image by Raisa Zwart Photography.