Frankfurt  - Dirt under the fingernails is a dead giveaway that someone is participating in the latest trend among young people who live in the city.

It's a sign that they've spent some time, perhaps a lot of time, over a weekend in urban garden plots or on their balconies tending to plants. All things natural are currently in, according to trend researchers. That goes for indoors as well as outdoors. Leaf and floral motifs are seen on everything from ceramics to pillows, while birds and butterflies accent wallpaper and upholstery.

Experts at the Bora-Herke style consultancy in Frankfurt see the twining vines, blooming flowers and other natural patterns as a component of the new romanticism.

"There's most certainly been a great influence from fashion. Florals were a big hit last summer," said Annetta Palmisano, an employee of the bureau. Compared with the last natural wave, the designs are more playful and light.

"It's become a lot more relaxed," said Kerstin Maenner, a spokeswoman for Ambiente, an international interior design trade show in Frankfurt. For many years the natural look represented a very narrow spectrum. Those days are over, especially when it comes to colours.

"In natural designs, you tend to think mostly of earth tones," said Palmisano. But currently instead of beige, brown, grey and shades of white, the colours red, green and yellow - also known as energy colours - are up and coming, the trend expert said.

And because natural designs have developed from their status as boring, white-bread and even organic into something hip, the motifs also have changed. Added to the pretty flowers, cute birds and filigree butterflies are animals that until now have not really been welcome in the apartment - all types of large and small insects, for example.

They appear as large as a child's foot and neatly arranged in the patterns on some of the rugs by Maltzahn Carpets of Nottuln, Germany. By contrast gaudy bugs are teeming on the sofa cushions of the company Zoeppritz of Heidenheim, Germany.

Furthermore, bugs seem to like hanging out on the table. In Monica Tsang's designs they look avant-garde. The Hong Kong designer combines insects and caterpillars, turning them into ornamentations that are recognizable only on second glance. But at porcelain manufacturer Reichenbach of Germany, they are classic and elegant.

There is an alternative for people whose reaction to crawling insects is having the hair on the back of their neck stand up. Butterflies are insects of choice for them.

The light-winged creatures are fluttering not only along romantic pathways this summer. And they are often combined with a pinch of humour. A mailbox made by a Berlin company has butterflies flying over it. But a chirping sound comes out when the flap is opened.

The German design company Schneeweiss ensures that the delicate insects cut a more masculine form. They appear colourfully on the white leather of a lounge chair in one of the company's lines. And butterflies have long felt at home on dinnerware. (dpa)