saucer magnolia blossom

Here's another windfall from my gathering of lots of long flowering branches today--a single saucer magnolia flower (pruned from the lower portion of the branch, so it wouldn't wind up in the water of my bucket). This is so gorgeous, and would have wound up in the compost heap had there not been a vase waiting for it on the windowsill!

oak leaf hydrangea leaflet

I was pulling the bottom leaves off some longer oak leaf hydrangea stems to condition them when I realized how beautiful the discards were. Here's one little almost-discarded cluster of young leaves. Fit perfectly into the smaller chamber of  this inkwell.

leaf silhouettes on eggs died with onion skins

Kate, Eliza, and I tried dying eggs with all sorts of natural dyes this weekend. Almost all of the dyes we made (from beets, red cabbage, turmeric, paprika, yarrow) colored the eggs almost not at all, but the dye made from onion skins worked! It turned the eggs a deep sepia color, and thanks to inspiration from Leigh Leffler, we knew how to ghost some leaf and flower silhouettes onto the eggs (hint: old stockings are involved). Haven't had so much fun "crafting" in a long time!

henbit blooming, so it must be spring!

This is one of my favorite spring wildflowers/weeds. I seem to never be able to capture its sweet, pale magenta flowers and deep magenta buds in a photo, but here it is at least being honored in a vase. I like to think the vase is very valuable (I'm sure it's not) just because I like the idea of arranging a weed in Waterford crystal!

tulip, locust pod, daffodil, green onions, etc.

It's cold outside! Supposed to go down to 31 in Ashland tonight. So I picked a little 'Lilac Wonder' tulip that I thought might get damaged. Also in this arrangement are one tiny, pale yellow 'Hawera' daffodil, some Lenten roses, and some green onion foliage. The brown locust pod was already sitting on the windowsill, so I just pulled it over to enjoy the company of the brown vase. Forsythia blooming in the background outside.

daffodils, etc.

Windowsill, and garden, full of blooming things. Today's bounty: a handful of daffodils and some yellow violas.

sweet Campari tomatoes

At Virginia Beach. Beautiful mugs on the windowsill. Added sweet Campari tomatoes (so delicious!) and a sprig of juniper from the yard. 

camellias, etc.!

I could write forever about this arrangement, because it seems like my entire life is wrapped up in it. The camellias came from a shrub, now about 7 feet tall, that I propagated (by air layering) from a camellia in Rosalie Nachmann's Richmond garden. And Rosalie died this year, so the flowers seem like a tribute to her. And also in this arrangement are little snippets of green stinking hellebore flowers that have been sitting patiently on the windowsill in other containers for weeks. Plus, there's a nandina twig in the middle that I picked in DECEMBER, and showed at a talk in January, because it was miraculously putting out tiny, new green leaves. Now (almost three months later) those fresh green leaves are real, almost normal-sized leaves. And then there's the vase Lisa Mahlandt gave me last summer and the dried alder twig peeking in from the left.....

daffy-down-dilly

"Daffy-down-dilly's come up to town/In her yellow petticoat and her green gown." But these poor daffodils have been whacked by weather so often that their stems were bent in two, sometimes three, places. This nice, tall vase helps them hold their heads up.