October 7, 2011--seek and ye shall find

Remember I said I wished I had a black bottle on Oct. 4? We'll I found one on Oct. 7! In the bar of The Liason Hotel in Washington, D.C.  A BEAUTIFUL black Hendirck's gin bottle.  Mary Garner Mitchell and I , who were in D.C. to see Robert Llewellyn's photography show at the U.S. Botanic Garden, had to drink the whole bottle of gin to get it (or that's one version of the story; in another version we just sweet-talked the bartender).  Anyway, it's a perfectly beautiful bottle I'm sure I'll use over and over.  The only thing wrong with the Liason Hotel, which we loved otherwise, was the fact that its windowsills are only about 1/2 inch wide---defintely too narrow to hold a Hendrick's gin bottle.  So I just held it up near the windowsill.  Finding plant material for this "arrangement" was relatively easy. Went out early, walked around the block, and in the garden beds around the otherwise pristine Japanese War Memorial at New Jersey and Louisianna Avenues, I found these weeds, which I helpfully pulled up. (No one else was carrying an armload of weeds on New Jersey Avenue before breakfast this morning, but I sort of enjoyed the distinction!). I actually pulled up both some smartweed and some sedges but used only the sedges.  I shudder to think what the chambermaid is thinking about the smartweed I left behind in the trash.

Pretty label on the gin bottle, too.