I walked through my garden yesterday with some clear ideas in mind as to what I'd use in a vase this week. Once I cut a flower as a focal point, the rest of my choices usually fall into place. If I come up short, I make another pass through the garden and, more often than not, I can find something to fill out an arrangement. When I carry my glass jar of cuttings back to the house I'm generally satisfied that I'll be able to pull together what I've cut. That didn't happen yesterday. I pulled out another glass jar and tried again. When I'd filled that with pieces of this and that, I still wasn't happy. So I re-sorted everything into two completely different mixes and went back outside to cut a few things to fill in the blanks. The result? Three vases.
The original inspiration for vase #1 was
Grevillea rosmarinifolia, which I'd planned to pair with the first
Alstroemeria bloom I'd noticed earlier in the week. But the
Alstroemeria was past its prime and I lost my intended focal point.
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| In the end, I recycled a stem of pink Lisianthus (Eustoma grandiflorum) I'd had in a vase in my office as a new focal point and used Leucadendron 'Chief', which has pink and red flower-like bracts, to tie together the colors in the Lisianthus and the Grevillea. |
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| Back view: I picked a paler pink Lisianthus to dress up the other side of the vase and used Narcissus to echo the yellow tones in the Leucadendron |
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| Top view |
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| Clockwise from the upper left: Eustoma grandiflorum (aka Lisianthus), Coleonema pulchelum 'Sunset Gold', noID Narcissus, Grevillea rosmariniflia, Leucadendron salignum 'Chief', and Penstemon mexicali 'Mini Red Bells' |
Vase #2 was going to be constructed using the white snapdragons in my cutting garden which, despite my best efforts, are once again covered in rust and are therefore living on borrowed time. Without a lot of thought I picked a nearby foxglove stem to go with the snaps but, to steal a phrase from Marie Kondo, the pairing didn't "spark joy." I gravitated away from white toward purple flowers but didn't find a focus until I cut some multi-colored
Violas.
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| The purple, white and orange Violas led me to add the orange berries and Grevillea flowers to the mix |
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| Back view: The purple Sweet Pea Bush (Polygala fruticosa) flowers look better in person than they do in these photos, where they appear more pink than purple |
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| Top view |
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| Clockwise from the upper left: noID Viola, berries of Auranticarpa rhombifolium, Campanula poscharskyana, Grevillea 'Superb', Digitalis purpurea, and Polygala fruticosa (shown with Gomphena decumbens 'Itsy Bitsy') |
The leftover snapdragons went into vase #3, along with a few other things I picked to tie them together with the yellow flowers I'd picked during my first pass through the garden.
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| The florescent yellow weed, Oxalis stricta, picked up the bright yellow touches in the white snapdragons |
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| Back view: I used 2 species of yellow-flowered Euryops here as well and added a couple of blue notes to the mix |
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| Top view |
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| Clockwise from the upper left: Oxalis stricta, Antirrhinum majus, Salvia 'Mystic Spires', Rosmarinus 'Gold Dust', Euryops chrysanthemoides, and E. virgineus |
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All material © 2012-2020 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party
