November 2, 2011

This is sort of a mess, and way more complicated that what I usually do in the windowsill, but it's what I ended up with today. The most interesting part of it is the container. I was taking some plant material out of a crockery vase (where it wasn't working) and putting it temporarily in a red plastic cup (just to keep it in water), when I realized it looked better in the cup than it had in the vase. So I started fiddling with it in the cup, and this is what I wound up with.

The materials are a mixture of things I'd harvested before frost (like the red zinnias), and things that are still  hanging on outside  (like apricot roses). Also included: arum leaves, parsley leaves, winterberry (from an earlier arrangement), and my beloved okra (two pods that I've used in half a dozen arrangements over the past few weeks). The swoopy stems are winter jasmine.

This conglomeration makes me think of something I realized years ago (but can't always act upon). The carpenter's joke "I keep cutting and it's still too short" has a corollary in flower arranging: "I keep adding things and it's still too complicated."

Here's a closeup of the red plastic cup to prove it really is a red plastic cup.