Creating Living Art: A Look Into The World of Floral Design

Carolyn Clement works on a floral arrangement at a wedding venue. Reflecting back on her long career as a florist, Clement said, "At first, I felt like I didn't know what I was doing. Nothing looked like it came from a florist, which I wanted. I wanted to be more creative."

Selah Greer, Editor in Chief of The Spark

There are infinite possibilities to turn creativity into a career in our world where art often eludes the canvas, and for some, the only canvas required is a vase. 

Floral design offers a unique outlet for both artistic expression and entrepreneurship, and at the age of 83, local florist and founder of Millefleurs, Carolyn Clement, is keeping the art alive. 

With just a set of red clippers, a spool of wire, spray paint, and buckets overflowing with carnations, ranunculus, chamomile, and hydrangea, Clement can transform a collection of stems into a stunning arrangement that explodes with both color and creativity. 

An arrangement created by Carolyn Clement for a fundraiser at Elk River Country Club. The fundraiser was themed after the show Yellowstone. Like many of Clement’s designs, this arrangement reflects the inspiration she finds in nature. “I studied a lot of English floral design because they do real natural garden looks and that's what I was interested in.”

Clement first discovered her passion for floral design when she joined the altar guild at her church and made arrangements every Sunday.

“I began foraging all around the neighborhood that summer,” Clement said.

Her foraged displays did not go unnoticed, and an Appalachian State student asked Clement to do flowers for her wedding. 

“And that's how I got started,” Clement said. “It was very small at first, but it grew and grew and grew.”

Soon, others in the community began noticing Clement’s talent and would ask her to do a wedding for their daughter or themselves. As requests kept pouring in, she realized that learning more about the trade could transform her newfound hobby into a business, so she enrolled in a three week course at the Chicago floral arts school. The course was in February, and Clement recalls that winter as especially bitter. The streets were covered by a thick layer of ice, and the wind from Lake Michigan whipped the snow into the air. 

“We practiced on arrangements for funerals, casket covers,” Clement said. “We did a lot of funerals. I guess that's a huge business for florists, but I wanted to do parties and weddings.”

Though funerals were not the type of occasion Clement wanted to showcase her art, she did learn valuable skills in Chicago - like techniques for wiring flowers to help them stand up and how to keep flowers looking fresh for longer - that would help her when she officially started her own floral design business. 

When she returned from Chicago, Clement transformed her garage into a flower shop and began ordering specialty flowers to add to the ones grown in her garden, foraged in the woods, and cut on the side of the road. 

"There was a local wholesale florist at the time in Newland. I bought most of my flowers over there,” Clement said. “He had cut flowers from South America, but I met this other gentleman who had all these special flowers. He could get anything from Holland, California, New Zealand, everywhere."

Why would anyone need flowers from as far away as New Zealand? For florists, it is not necessarily the type of flower, but the growing season in different climates around the world. Peonies, for example, bloom in the early summer in the United States, so when a bride wants peonies for her August wedding, Clement orders them from Alaska. 

However, shipping live flowers from Alaska to Boone, North Carolina presents its own unique set of challenges. Florists have no control over the quality of flowers when they arrive, and often have to adjust their plans if the product arrives in unideal condition.  

Fuschia Moss, local florist and owner of King Street Flowers, is familiar with this aspect of floral design.  

"A big challenge floral designers face every day is that we are working with a live product," Moss said. "Sometimes flowers come to us in the wrong color or may have been damaged in transport. Knowing how to handle different scenarios just comes down to experience."

Over the course of her many years as a florist, Carolyn Clement has encountered many of the "scenarios" Moss described, like huge arrangements topping over, or the one wedding where a hurricane came through the night before. Trees and power lines littered the road, and Clement was unable to get to Blowing Rock where the wedding was being held. Luckily, she had taken the arrangements to the venue the day before and an employee was able to get out of her driveway to finish setting up. 

Looking ahead to the weather forecast saved Clement for that wedding, but not all dire situations can be prevented through careful planning. Clement remembers hearing a story about one such unavoidable instance of floral disaster. 

"I had a friend who was a big time floral designer in New York City,” Clement said. "He had a noon wedding he was doing on a Saturday, in this huge Catholic cathedral. He had his van packed, ready to go. He came to work the next morning and someone had stolen the van with all the flowers in it."

Life as a florist is often unpredictable and sometimes challenging, but for Clement, the joy her designs bring to others makes the hard days worth it.

“Weddings and parties are happy occasions,” Clement said. “I just love to be happy and joyful and make other people happy with my flowers.”

Though Clement’s emergence as a florist was unconventional, it was a beginning that inspired the abundance of creativity still evident in her floral design. These days, you can find Carolyn Clement in her garage, creating the original and artistic flowers she fell in love with all those years ago.