Colourful & bicoloured flowers

Bicoloured varieties are among the most exciting flowers on the market: roses with a picotee edge like ‘Sweetness’, where a creamy white petal is finely rimmed in pink, flamed tulips like ‘Rem’s Favourite’ or the red-and-white parrot tulip ‘Estella Rijnveld’, lisianthus with edges that look hand-painted — and alstroemeria, whose speckled throats look as if someone had drawn strokes with a fine pen.

There is history and biology behind the patterns. The flamed tulips that cost fortunes during the Dutch tulip mania owed their stripes to a virus — today the Rembrandt markings are bred in and stable. Speckles and dashes, as on alstroemeria or foxglove, are nectar guides: landing strips that show insects the way. Variegated, by the way, is what we call patterned foliage — it sets accents in a bouquet too.

And then there is the mixed bouquet itself: the colourful summer bouquet is the classic of classics — dahlias, cosmos, snapdragons and alstroemeria, loosely tied, as if straight from the field. Hardly any bouquet sparks joy as reliably, because it has nothing to prove: it is simply cheerful.

To keep colourful from turning chaotic, we tie around one lead colour that repeats two or three times, with plenty of greenery as a buffer between strong tones. Bicoloured blooms are worth gold here: a speckled alstroemeria picks up its neighbours’ colours and ties them together. We buy the ingredients fresh at the Veiling every day — whatever summer offers ends up in the bouquet.