potted catalogs

Desperate for color but having almost nothing in bloom I decided to pot up some seed catalogs.

not arum

I was shopping at Sandy's Plants yesterday when Sandy herself appeared and showed me several plants I'd have overlooked in her greenhouses. One was a gorgeous, tropical looking thing from which she harvested this leaf for me. Looks like a gigantic arum leaf, but it's not. I've left Sandy a message asking her to remind me the plant's name, because it's evidently hardy in Virginia and I want to go back and buy one. Would be great to have in the garden for its leaves alone.

roses in silvered bud vase

This isn't a silver budvase--it's a "silvered" one that my daughter sells (cheap) at thearrangersmarket.com. Love it. And it looks great with small, spray roses in it. These aren't spray roses and they're a bit too big for the vase, but I had them leftover from some other arrangements Kate and I were doing today. This is her windowsill and the second photo shows the larger arrangement we were working on. Guess which one was the most fun to do? The small, windowsill arrangement, naturally.

poinsettia flowers and yellow nandina

LOVE using poinsettia flowers as cut flowers, because they are so dramatic and last such a long time. Cut these coral-colored ones a while ago and they still look fresh.  Here I've combined them with some yellow nandina foliage.

Park Seed catalog (with Aucuba)

This is fun because of what you can see out the window--a Christmas wreath still hanging on the garden gate! Gotta get that down. And there's a piece of pussy willow peeking in from the left, but this array was supposed to be about the seed catalog, which used as a prompt for the arrangement--variegated Aucuba in a yellow watering can.

more pussy willow

I've been cleaning out the barn at Flower Camp, where I came across these two little urns. Had them sitting around the sink to wash them when I started preparing some long pussy willow branches for an arrangement. These tiny pieces are part of what I trimmed off the stems of the larger branches.

hunk of nandina

I pulled this hunk of nandina berries and foliage out of a basket on my front door, because it looked half-dead. Not too dead to display it on the windowsill, though!

guinea feather

A friend sent me some guinea hen feathers, and this is one of them. So pretty! The little container was a Christmas present. Libbey Oliver tells me she bought it from a potter who made these little ceramic "stools" with holes in them just because she was looking for something do with her leftover clay.

driftwood, shells, feathers

These are some materials I picked up on a Nags Head beach this past weekend. One of the cups is the cup I borrowed to bring them home in; the other is one I borrowed to bring my iced tea home in. It must have been yesterday's stacked mugs that inspired me to stack the cups.(The lower one has a paper towel in the bottom to raise the second one up a bit.) And the clam shells just looked pretty draped over the sides.

stacked mugs with aucuba

Here's what happened after I decided I liked the look of one clay-colored dish under a green mug of Aucuba foliage. If one's good, why not two?!

The array evolves

One day last week, to my pots of green sticks and Lincoln log structure I added a mug of Aucuba foliage.And to make it a little more "of a piece" with the clay pots already on the windowsill, I put a clay dish under it. And that gave me a bright idea for what happened today, which I'll post separately.

more stick play

This little structure of kerria sticks (swiped from yesterday's arrangement and shortened) was so much fun to make! Reminded me of playing with  Lincoln logs. The log-cabin-like structure surrounds a little green vase, and the foliage in it is cryptomeria. The cryptomeria foliage has been cycling in and out of various arrangements for over a month!

Kerria sticks in clay pots

I started playing with these sticks about a week ago, and I'm still playing with them. John and I had cut a kerria shrub to the ground and carted all the stems off to the brush pile when I realized they were way too green and pretty to discard. I've used some long, tapering ones in a big arrangement in the living room, and now I'm shuffling the remaining straight stem pieces around in various vases. I think I like them best in these clay pots.

     The colder January gets, the greener these stems look in comparison to everything else.

hazelnut catkins

I love the catkins that hang on my hazelnut shrub at this time of year, but I've never been able to display them in a way that suits me, because the twigs are sort of angular and the catkins never hang as gracefully in a vase as they do on the shrub. Tried again last night and this was the result--still unsuccessful, but I do like the color of the catkins with the color (or non-color) of the vase.

pussy willow/blue light

It was the light outdoors that made this so much fun to look at--pussy willow inside, blue light outside.

so January

I actually had a couple of pansy flowers I might have dropped into a vase today, but this silvered vase seemed to call for something starker and more January-esque. Had these evergreen cryptomeria snippets leftover from another arrangement, so I used them.