August 1-8, 2011--vacation flowers

Well. here's how it went on vacation trip to Seattle with two teenage grandsons. First photo is of sweetpeas sitting on hotel windowsill. Bought them at Pike's Market, when I thought the wonderful flowers on the corner were all there were. They're still in their brown paper wrapper but dropped into a plastic cup of water.

Here they are again. So unfair that people in the Pacific Northwest can grow sweet peas like these with such ease!!!

Next day, just to do something different, I removed the white sweet peas and clustered the remaining sweet peas in two Subway cups. Thank goodness for Subway!

Next day we were in less posh surroundings. Grandson Adam suggested using banana as container and ran out to gather me some flowers, none of which felt filched, from around the Mill Valley Motel.  They include dandelions, red pieris japonica foliage, variegated euonymus foliage, salvia.

Next day we were in even less posh surroundings, in Castle Rock, WA. View from window was of old trucks and and an abandoned teepee structure, which I decided to reproduce (sort of) in windowsill arrangement.

Next day no time for arranging; we were white-water rafting, but Adam picked me a red geranium flower (from pots around the motel)  and I dropped it into a hard lemonade bottle.

I'm thinking I deserve extra points for even trying to arrange flowers in windowsills on this rafting/hiking expedition with grandchildren (we hiked Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, too), when we finally get back to Pikes Market and I discover the corner where I'd found the sweet peas is just 1/20th of the expanse of flowers in the market. I've never seen more beautiful flowers offered more inexpensively. Flowers of this quality would be ten  times as expensive in NY!!!  Unfortunately, it's time to head back to Virginia, but here's a teaser photo re what's available, for $10 a bunch (or even just $5 a bunch if it's only sweet peas), in Seattle.