honeysuckle berries

Love these black and green berries on a graceful wild honeysuckle vine. The photo captures something else timely, too--maple and tulip poplar leaves on the roof.

pansy opera star

I was about to replace this fading pansy when I realized its wilting lower petals looked like a mouth. And because I always see pansies as faces anyway, this one seemed to be singing!

cypress vine vs. cardinal creeper

In case you missed it (and this is not exactly CNN-worthy), there has been an ongoing discussion on Facebook about whether or not the vine I described in an earlier post was cardinal creeper or cypress vine. Well, I found my seed packages and I now know that what's growing on my veggie garden fence (and pictured below) is cardinal creeper, not cypress vine (although I've included both seed packet photos). They're obviously almost identical, but the give-away is the leaves--broader and bigger on cardinal creeper. And how will I remember this? I'm going to try to remember that cypress vine leaves are very deeply dissected--resembling the needles of a baldcypress tree.

one nasturtium stem

I was happy with yesterday's arrangement--the one I did in Kate's birch bark container. And it was way more appropriate to give as a gift than the one I did immediately after. But, in terms of providing me a meaningful moment, this one-stemmed, simple little arrangement surpassed that many-stemmed, complicated one. I found this beautiful little nasturtium stem in the sink among other debris leftover from the larger arrangement. It was beautiful beyond imagining but how to display it? In an out-of-the-way cabinet I found this tiny blue bottle and then realized the tendril needed a backdrop. In my stash of half a dozen colored tiles from Lowe's, I found this blue one. Be still my heart! For once, I thought I had done something I admired justice.  

 

a little bit of everything in bark vase

This is an arrangement I'm going to give away later today, but I thought it could do double duty as a windowsill arrangement. The vase is wonderful--something Kate sells on thearrangersmarket.com--fluted birch bark with large test tubes nested inside. Almost anything looks great in this vase, and that's a good thing, because I decided to put "almost anything" in it this morning! Included are nasturtiums, snapdragons, a yellow, daisy-like annual I've forgotten the name of, lipstick salvia, wild honeysuckle, and a snippet or two of farewell summer (my favorite late-blooming, wild white aster).

color walk

I went on a color walk around the garden and wound up with this sweet handful of materials--lipstick-red pokeweed leaves,yellowish amsonia leaves, white and yellow honeysuckle blossoms, pink rosebud, lavendar asters, apricot rose, magenta celosia, multicolored hydrangea blossom. Go fall!

straight and crooked

This is so far outside my ability to photograph it I shouldn't even try, but the subjects really interested me, so...,here you go. The plant material in the bottle is seed structures of fall anemone. Someone I talked to on Tuesday, Debra Prinzing, confirmed my perception that these seed structures are easier to arrange with than fall anemone flowers themselves. This has something to do with the nice, straight postures of the seed structures vs. the flowers. I love it when someone confirms what I already knew, but didn't know I knew! Anyway, these seed structures looked perfectly beautiful in a bottle I'd been saving because I loved its contents--Elderberry lemonade. That lemonade (which must exist in exclusive grocery stores somewhere but not in mine) was absolutely delicious, and I saved the bottle in hopes that the bottle would  remind me to buy it if I ever encountered it again. So far, no luck on that, but it's a beautiful bottle, and its label is attached at a really interesting angle. Straight seed structures vs. angled  bottle label. It would take a photographer much better than me to capture what's going on here!