Making Your Flowers Work
As we get into the season, there’s a certain amount of excitement. Seedlings are taking off, rows are being planted, and the first harvests are starting to be had. It’s wonderful just to have flowers to arrange with again, and our days and nights will be spent harvesting, processing and arranging our flowers.
This is also the time of year where things also start to go wrong. Sometimes there’s a crop failure. Sometimes a variety is less productive or doesn’t turn out quite like the way you want it to. Sometimes you thought it was a good idea, but in reality it looks far too weedy or the color is off or it just doesn’t work for some reason.
It happens to us every year, and it happens to pretty much every flower farmer out there. We work with nature, and things don’t always go as planned, and no matter how hard we research, select and plan out our flowers, there is always a wrench in the gears.
For some people, it’s still early enough to start a new round of seeds. Or perhaps you can purchase in some plugs. But for many of us, it’s too late and the particular variety you’re looking for won’t flower before the end of the season. Perhaps you’ve run out of space in your beds. Or perhaps you’re just too tired to add in anything else on top of everything you’re trying to manage already.
It can be really frustrating. What do you do when your flowers aren’t necessarily the ones that you’d like to have? What if you were wanting to have blush dahlias, cosmos and roses for the summer but none of them turned out? What if you don’t have enough filler, or your foliage looks ratty from flea beetles?
I think we’ve all been there in some form or fashion. The problem is that you can’t just wave a wand and make flowers appear - you’re going to have to make do with the flowers you have growing.
So now what?
The good news is that as long as you have flowers, you can make them work. Indeed, half the battle of flower farming is ensuring that you have enough volume in vegetation - it almost doesn’t matter what you plant so long as you have a lot of it (unless you’re specifically growing for an event that will require a certain variety or color - something that we never do because of the unpredictability of nature and the reasons mentioned earlier).
Usually you will have a lot of something, even if it’s that something that you didn’t necessarily plan on having a lot of. And that’s the key - if you have flowers, we can make your flowers work for you, even if they aren’t the most ideal flowers or they’re not the flowers you planned on having.
I’ll be going over some ways to make flowers work together, including some really helpful tricks we’ve used when we’ve found ourselves at a loss!
Combine by color
One of the easiest ways to make flowers come together is through unity via color. It doesn’t matter if your flowers don’t make any sense in your head - if they are all of the same color, or even of the same color scheme they will start making sense.
Maybe you start off with white cosmos - you have a lot of that, buckets in fact. You also have some white Oklahoma zinnias as well, so you add that to the mix. And there is some variegation in the snow-in-summer Euphorbia marginata you have growing, so you cut a couple stems of that. And the apple mint has a nice silvery sheen to it, so you add that too. And the Shirley poppies that were absolutely beautiful but had a terrible vase life have left some silvery-green-blue colored pods that can add some great texture to an arrangement, as well as that wild and weedy grass that popped up in your beds that you had meant to weed out but just didn’t get around to doing…and boom, you suddenly have plenty of materials that come together in a very pleasing way.
Certain colors pair together well. Whites and ivories and creams obviously go together, but they also mix well with silvers, light greens and green-and-whites. You can even combine lighter colors as well - light pink, blush, airy sky blues (think light blue delphinium) and light yellows (buttery primrose yellow, not highlighter yellow) to great effect. You can also aim for a gradient of the colors - say go for all warm colors or cool colors, and they will go together very well. Burgundies, hot pinks, reds, oranges and yellows make for a great and vibrant color scheme while greens, blues, light purples and deep purples go well together too.
Combine by origin
A helpful way to start organizing your materials and have a better chance of making them work together is to choose varieties that are from a certain origin.
You can achieve a very certain look by choosing varieties that are endemic to a certain region. For instance, big fluffy dahlias are evocative of lush British gardens and cutting gardens, while single dark-centered sunflowers may be more evocative of Americana and the agricultural history of the USA. We tend towards two polarities - growing very fluffy, cottage-garden European species on one end such as English roses, dinnerplate dahlias and crepe-paper-petaled poppies as well as exotic, glossy-foliaged, structural New World species such as nicotiana, castor bean flowers, small single-petaled zinnias and flowering basil. While you can combine the two, it does come off a bit odd - it can go from eccentric to a hot mess very quickly - so if you’re not feeling confident about your designing ability, it can be far easier to just grow and arrange with just one category of flowers.
If in doubt, try just selecting flowers from a certain region. They will usually have similar growing needs, and will usually just fit together more than flowers from disparate regions. For example, purple coneflowers, switchgrass, gayfeather, mountain mint and goldenrod pull together very well, evoking the great plains of the American Midwest.
Everyone has their own history with flowers - you may find zinnias to be either very low-rent flowers or one of the most exquisite and precious blooms you can find. If it makes sense to you, that’s all that matters.
Add more filler and foliage
It can be difficult to combine focal flowers together - both may be competing for attention in an arrangement or bouquet and cause more dissonance than elicit harmony in a design. I see too many bouquets and arrangements where focal flowers such as anemones and roses are mashed together with no regard to the form or structure of each flower.
If you shove these focal flowers together, it just starts looking super ruffled, very heavy, overstuffed, and just too much. It’s like having a five course meal in which every course consists of ice cream - excellent in small quantities but it gets to be too much in large quantities.
Instead, space them out by adding some filler. Filler, such as grasses or feverfew or basil helps to break up the large masses of flowers, allowing them some space in your design.
It’s really amazing how just a few stems of filler or some foliage really helps an arrangement come together. It helps to give some separation between the blooms while at the same time stitches the entire design together.
Note that the best filler and foliage are usually neutral in color - greens of any shade are usually a safe bet, with whites, silvers, and even purple and burgundy works well too.
Here are some posts on growing our favorite fillers:
How to Grow Broomcorn in the Garden (and for Floral Design)
How to Grow Basil for Floral Design
How to Grow Daucus (Chocolate Lace Flower, Queen Anne's Lace)
Nine Spring Fillers and Foliages for Flower Farmers
Favorite Herbs to Grow as a Flower Farmer
Forage - when appropriate
Sometimes you just need something a little bit extra in an arrangement, but you can’t find it amongst your flowers. Sometimes it just needs that little bit of wildness, or something a bit more out of the box that gives you a little bit unexpected or surprising.
Once when we were putting together a wedding, one of the floral designers that was working with us clipped off a few stems of grass seed heads and popped them into the arrangements. I was amazed - it completely changed the look of the arrangement - but I had no idea what it was from. She pointed it out to me, and I realized it was from a common weed on our property - Eragrostis ciliaris, aka ‘Stinking Lovegrass’.
This changed the way I looked at the weeds and plants. What if instead of fighting with them, we instead incorporated them into our design and arrangements? What if we could use them to our advantage? Or what if we could even find them to be desirable elements of our floral design palette?
I soon found that a little bit of weed foraged from the wilder area of our property adds that special touch. A bit of wild raspberry, Johnsongrass, or even a bit of thistle or clover (that we would never intentionally cultivate) is a great bit of unexpected detail that brings a bit of unique beauty. For some people, it may evoke a feeling of wilderness - something that they might encounter out while hiking or driving down a country road.
Especially for invasive weeds, we like to use them if it helps to keep them from getting too vigorous and therefore spreading - all within the restrictions of ethical use (not allowing it to reseed or spread, only foraging where we have the explicit permission to do so and so on). It’s a perfect way of helping do our part of keeping invasives in check while also providing something a little bit extra to our arrangements without having to cultivate it on our property and run the risk of it invading and crowding out our more desirable species and varieties.
When in doubt, try something new
While there are some tried and true combinations (Cafe au Lait dahlias and Dark Opal basil will always be one of my favorite and most-used combinations) sometimes it’s important to push yourself and try something a little bit different, something new.
You may be surprised. It’s how we discovered some of our favorite new materials - horehound as a foliage, London rocket seed pods as a filler, evening primrose and four o’clocks tucked into arrangements that have now become a regular part of our materials.
And although not everything necessarily works together, you may be happily surprised at what you discover. Necessity being the mother of invention, sometimes you make your best discoveries when you have to get a bit creative and go out on a limb when it comes to designing with unconventional materials.
Even if you’re not sure if it will work as a cut flower material, just cut a stem of it and see how it does. If it doesn’t work out, great - now you know. But if it does, you could open yourself up to a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to materials and floral design.
If you’re interested in reading about some unusual and exotic plants to grow as cut flowers, here are a few of our favorites:
Five Herbs and Vegetables To Use as Cut Flowers
Growing Pineapple Lilies (Eucomis) in the Garden and for Floral Design
How to Grow Castor Bean (Ricinus) in the Garden and for Floral Design
Growing Salvias in the Garden (And for Floral Design)
I hope this helps you not get frustrated with your flowers!
It can be really easy to get sucked into what you don’t have available vs. what you do have available. And in the future you’re probably going to be more successful as you learn and grow as a flower farmer, knowing what works for you and your soil and your environment and what doesn’t.
But there’s no reason that if you have a lot of flowers growing that you can’t create something beautiful or bring joy to others with the flowers that you do have. As the years go by, I become more grateful and more appreciative of the flowers that grow well and easily here and become less focused on having a specific outcome. With more flexible expectations, we become a lot less frustrated with flower farming overall.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to start a flower farm, there’s plenty of good posts on this site as well as our eBook bundle on flower farming!
