July 16, 2011---challenging "vase"

Little did Lucy Coggin know, when she gave me this little cup day before yesterday, that I'd look at it and think, "challenging vase!" Lucy probably thought of it as a floral-themed cup, but everything that holds water is a vase to me. This vessel looked challenging not just because of the floral motif on the side was complex but because it had a wide mouth, which meant it would require lots of stems to fill it up. Luckily, I spent lots of time gardening today and did lots of clipping, deadheading, and other sorts of activities that resulted in cut flowers too pretty to throw in the compost heap. Among them were pinkish-to-apricot-colored yarrow flowers, sunflower buds (on the ground with a flopped stem) and vervain of some sort. I combined them in the cup Lucy gave me with a reddish castor bean leaf salvaged from another arrangement and yellow hypericum flowers I noticed on a shrub not far from the windowsill where I'd propped this "vase." Although it took lots of stems to fill up just this little cup (the downside of any "vase" with a wide mouth), I sort of like the result. And the best part was that Lucy had taught me windowsills have two sides---inside and out---so I could put my arrangement on the OUTSIDE windowsill, which is so much easier to photograph, light-wise, than an indoor windowsill.