The Line

Floral arrangement, when approached as a design discipline, begins with line. The equivalent of the artist’s mark, long before colour, before volume, there is gesture: the reach of a branch, the inclination of a stem, the creation of a space left deliberately empty. Each stem seeks to propose a direction — a way of travelling through air — and it is these trajectories that give an arrangement its underlying structure and thereby its voice.

To arrange flowers is, in many ways, to draw. The hand follows instinct, informed by mind and soul, whilst the eye quietly measures continuously.

David Hockney talks of the flow between eye and hand when making marks, dry stone wallers talk of the flow that finds exactly the right stone - and its placement. Flow creates line.

In floral design, balance is not achieved through symmetry which can result in lifeless perfection, (the French: la symmetrie, c’est la tristesse) but instead through the careful creation of calibrated tension — a conversation between stems held lightly in conscious check. Just as in choreography, the art is in knowing when to allow a gesture to continue and when to let it fall. Too constrained and the tension created is oppressive, too loose and all sense of conversation, of connection, is lost. The conversation is the exciting bit.

By the closest of observation to these gestures, the lilt of a branch, the arc of a bloom as it opens — floral design becomes an exercise in, an expression of, spatial thinking. Flowers do not simply occupy space; they describe it and thereby make it their own. Line gives stems voice, allowing an arrangement to move, to breathe, to hold its own quiet authority — and to hold us. Line creates and holds emotion.

It is this sensitivity to line that gives floral design its enduring expressive power. Long after colour fades and petals fall, the memory that lingers is often one of movement — a sense that something was briefly, beautifully in motion.

It is this sense of something briefly, beautifully in motion, that the Hortus studio seeks. It is also my earliest memory of flowers, the beginning of their allure, their pull. Unknown at the time, it was also the beginning of Hortus Poeticus.