August 13, 2011--one thing leads to another

Today I took the blackberry lily stem I didn't quite know what to do with yesterday and used it as start of a new arrangement. Cut it into four sections, including one that was just a stem holding seed pods (they look like little green punching bags). To this, I added the thing that most interested me in the garden today--a stem of variegated daisy wingstem I came across while weeding. Daisy wingstem is a wildflower that I pull out like a weed (it gets 5 feet tall and will grow most anywhere), but this one with the variegated foliage is a plant I'd like to encourage, because I'll love using its foliage in arrangements. This was a fun little arrangement to pull together but not at all what I'd expected to do today. I was planning to do something lavish, with lots of flowers, but a thunderstorm drove me inside before I had time to pick and I clipped just the one stem of daisy wingstem foliage and a few black-eyed Susans. I decided not to use the black-eyed Susans, because I liked the "all green-ness" of this. Looks like outdoors right now: all lush shades of green.

August 12, 2011

Why is everything harder when you're tired? Spent almost all day among beatiful flowers, weeding, deadheading, etc., and in the process pulled out, by accident, this gorgeous stem of burgeoning blackberry lily buds. The stem with buds attached is over 3 feet long. I groaned when I pulled it. Set it aside on wheelbarrow to use in an arrangement. But I don't have the energy to create an arrangement, and was hoping I could just sit this stem in a windowsill, alone, to fulfill my windowsill arrangement requirement. But the light is all wrong, the arranger too spent to come up with anything interesting. Know just this: the blackberry lilies are between bloom and fruit--a beautiful stage that deserves better press.

August 11, 2011---queen red lime zinnia, etc.

Yesterday, when I was pulling zinnias together in plastic cups. there were some I didn't include because I didn't like them. In fact, as I was picking zinnias the day before, I was bemoaning the fact that I had even bought seeds for "Queen Red Lime" zinnias from Johnny's Selected Seeds. In the garden, they looked really bad--domed, fully double flowers with sort of a washed out, dusky magenta petals on the outside and greenish ones in the center. Nothing like the picture in the seed catalog. But I couldn't seem to throw the flowers away and they wound up, bouquet like, in this glass vase (shown in photo above). My photo is even less accurate, colorwise, than the color of the Queen Red Lime zinnias in the Johnny's catalog, but I've decided I like the 'real life' color of these zinnias, because, indoors, it looks soft and subtle, the way a peach does. I wouldn't call it peachy, but it's dusky in the way a peach is. The Queen Red Lime zinnia that shows up best in this photo is far right in the glass vase, and below. The flowers in the taller green vase are cockscomb and the whispy things behind them that look like sea oats are river oats. Unlike sea oats, which you shouldn't pick, river oats are invasive, but I like to grow them to cut.

This color is SO wrong, and I don't know how to fix it, but this shows you the form of the flower.

Aug. 10, 2011--with and without sunflowers

I separated yesterday's flowers into three smaller bunches and dropped them into some plastic cups (first photo). I'd never used these cups as vases before, but I think their watermelon motif and color works well with the zinnias. More interesting, though, is how adding some small sunflowers to these three arrangements perked them up. Their yellow is like an alarm--waking the other flowers up. And I like the fact that these puny sunflowers--way small because they've been poorly grown (by me)--are just the right size for these arrangements (second photo).

August 9, 2011

This is a bunch of zinnias pretty much "arranged" exactly as they fell into the bucket they're in. I picked them today just to keep the plants blooming. I have an idea about a way to arrange them tomorrow that may be more interesting.

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.

August 1, 2011---onion altar

This is wacky, but definitely a time/memory marker.  Arrangement alone (composed of recycled flowers--mostly celosia--from earlier arrangements) looked lonely on windowsill, so I started piling oniona around it. Had spent all day sorting through garden onions--separating rotting ones from healthy ones--and making onion soup (yummy!), so onions were all over the kitchen crying out (!) to be used.  Hence, the pile of onions around my glass vase.