Walking through the garden in mid-July, I selectively harvest early summer blooms for a subscriber’s large vase bouquet. With the yellow oriental lily, I match it with other yellow flowers, and collaborate these shades of yellow with flowers of white and blue.
Focal Flower
For this bouquet, I want the focus to be the oriental lily. Oriental lilies have a strong scent, more than other flowers that can overwhelm a room. For some, the smell is great; for others it is too much. It’s just a personal preference.
For the lilies that I grow in my garden, I don’t grow them as an annual as most flower farms do. They are a perennial flower, so I like treating them as such. I’m small scale so that I would prefer to invest in lilies that come back every year, rather than rip up the bulb from the soil every year. However, to be able to cut the lily and for it to perennialize, I let the lilies grow one year, then will harvest only 1/3 to 1/2 of the stem, leaving the remaining leaves to capture sunlight to produce energy for the lily bulb.
When using these older perennial lilies in a bouquet, they tend to be larger with more blooms than a standard lily cut flower. The standard usually has three blooms per stem. My lily stems have about 3 more. It may not be ideal for florist work, but for selling to market locally, customers love lilies.
Disk Flowers
This bouquet has three supporting disk-shaped flowers, including Gloriosa Double Rudbeckia, Ivory Princess Calendula, and Giant Yellow Marigold.
Gloriosa Double Rudbeckia are an excellent cool flower. I think they are the best rudbeckia as well with longer stems than the Sahara or the Cherokee Sunset. The hue of this bloom is the traditional golden yellow of the Indian Summer Rudbeckia or the perennial rudbeckia, but what makes it head over heels beautiful is that a good portion of the flowers are doubled. Think of a traditional Black-Eyed Susans combine with that of a zinnia and peony.
Ivory Princess Calendula are a cool flower that are meant to be started in early spring for my zone 5b. For these flowers to be in bloom mid-July, that’s what I did. However, I had these volunteer from the previous season. The seeds fell from the plant last fall, seeded off, and then overwintered after we rototilled the garden and all its contents in. The volunteer calendula plant began to grow in June and was blooming a few weeks later than the ones I planted in April.
Although these stems don’t last that long in a vase, they have multiple petals in a creamy yellow hue that helps transition the eyes from the golden yellows to the whites in the bouquet.
Giant Yellow Marigold are a hybrid variety of marigolds that produce such a ruffly, double-bomb style cut flower marigold. The color is bright yellow. Marigolds do have a scent to them that some don’t like, but I never mind it because it is not overwhelming to me.
Spike Flowers
Spike flowers give quite the added structure to any bouquet. It changes the structure of the open lilies and round disk flowers to something with some more volume.
Blue larkspur is a small spike flower for this season. I’ve seen other flower gardens grow this stem taller than a person. I started these as transplants, but it is best to start them direct sown instead. The blue hue of this stem is more of a dark shade of a bluish purple, but the deeper color is stunning when contrasted with the yellow focal and disk flowers. It takes it up to the next step.
The other spike flower for this bouquet is white Johnny’s Potomac Snapdragon. I love snapdragons throughout the season. Using white snapdragons allows the focus to be on the focal and disk flowers. And using a different color rather than yellow for the snapdragon spike balances out the colors.
Filler Flowers in the Bouquet
Filler flowers fill in the blank spots, but they also allow the focus to be on the focal and disk flowers. They take up the space of a disk or focal flower, but the actual blooms are dainty and small to mix-match with the focal flowers and disks.
Baby’s Breath is the traditional filler flower. I love the baby’s breath that comes from florists with their dainty double blooms. For growing locally, the common variety is Covent Garden with its single blooms. It still adds such grace to a bouquet.
Tetra White Feverfew is related to the daisy and mum family of flowers, but it has dainty flowers that fill up a bouquet beautifully. My favorite from this season. It does well as a cool flower, but once cut down or finished, it does produce a new set of blooms come fall. The main disadvantage has been the height of the plant. Sometimes the stems are shorter than needed. Still a favorite and it has more structure than the dainty and airy baby’s breath.
Yellow, White, and Blue Bouquet
When building a bouquet, it is fun to make a bouquet with all sorts of mixed flowers, but it really makes a statement when a color scheme is followed. Maybe it’s the girl who grew up next to Pitt-Johnstown with their navy blue and gold school colors. But, golden yellow flowers with blue is stunning. All the flowers coordinated well together. The overall hue of the bouquet is yellow, but adding in some blue spike flowers with white spike flowers and white filler flowers coordinates and make the bouquet a bit more colorful and balanced.
There is about 30 stems in this bouquet which fills out a large vase well. Marigolds, larkspur, and feverfew are shorter, so they are near the top of the vase. Lilies can be taller, but I start with them for the structure, so I like them to be near the bottom. Rudbeckia, baby’s breath, and calendula all work together for the middle ground, while one of the rudbeckias, larkspur, and white snapdragons add some height to the bouquet.