The 6 Elements of Floral Design: Line Flowers Explained

Hello flower friends! In my six elements of design, every stem has a purpose. In today's video, I'm digging deep into lime flowers. By the end of the video, you'll be able to identify lime flowers, you'll know exactly what role they play in your bouquets, and to be honest, you might even find out that they're the MVP of most arrangements. I'm Ellen Frost. I turn flower growers into flower designers. A while ago, I made a video about my six elements of design. This was my most popular video by far. It makes floral design so much easier once you understand all of the six elements. So today, we're digging deep into lime flowers. So what is a lime flower? It's a flower that grows in a line. They create a lot of height and a lot of length. They're different than a face flower, and this is an important differentiation because they play totally different roles in your design. Lupine is pretty new to me as a lime flower. I want to give you a couple other examples. This is foxglove. Another one is snapdragons. This is probably one of the most common lime flowers. We've also got stalk, which has a really great spicy smell. Another favorite spring lime flower is larkspur, and these are super tall. So similar to larkspur is delphinium. They come in shades of blue. It is a sought-after color. This is bells of ireland. It really adds some of that fresh green to your designs. There are so many lime flowers out in the world. I put a link in the description of a resource that has all of my favorites. So I'm starting with some foliage already in my vase, and I'm going to add my lime flowers next. I want my lime flowers to be the tallest thing in my arrangement. Here's a trick. Take your vase and take your lime flower and float your lime flower off the side of your table, and then you can see exactly where you want the top of your flower to be. Now proportionally, the best height for your arrangement is one and a half times the height of your vase, and the lime flowers are going to set that height for us. So I'm going to trim my stem right here, and then when I put my lime flower in, I'm going to let that be the tallest piece of my design. And you can see that when I placed it, I placed it in at an angle so that it is sort of facing out of the arrangement. The main thing that lime flowers do in the design is lead your eye to the really good stuff. So lime flowers are good, but they're going to lead your eye to the focal flowers. That's their job. We want to put them in strategically so that when we put our focals in, the lime flowers take our eye down to where the focal is going to be. There is something that happens with lime flowers if you use two of them, and that is what we call the bunny ears. You really don't want to have this bunny ear look. Now you can put in three, five, seven, more than that if you're doing a giant arrangement, but you really just want to stick with odd numbers so that you don't get the bunny ears. So that is a good sort of base for my lime flowers, and you can see that they have set the stage for the height and the shape, and they are going to lead my eye down to the focal flowers. But without the lime flowers, everything in your design starts to feel very round and very flat because you don't have this height to generate these lines. You really want these lines to create a natural look to your design so that it isn't that ice cream cone shape, round, everything is a face flower design. So I'm going to be adding my focal flowers. Today I'm going to be using some sunflowers, and remember focal flower is a face flower, different than our lime flowers. They have a different job. They are the focal. They are the thing that everybody wants to see, and the MVP role of these lime flowers is that they guide your eye down the arrangement to the focal flower, so you know exactly what to look at. That is their job. Without them, your eye doesn't know where to look. It is feeling scattered. It's feeling like it's not sure what's the most important thing. The lime flower, its main job is to follow, is to lead your eye to that best focal flower. So I'm going to add a few of these, and you can see that the lime flower, your eye starts at the top of the design and is led down right to these sunflowers, which are going to be the star of the show. Lime flowers are often overlooked, but I'm urging you do not overlook or skip lime flowers. They play an important role in creating your design, and without them, your designs can feel flat and too round and too tight. So I hope you enjoyed this video, and get out there and use lime flowers in your designs today.