October 15, 2012 -- salvia, bouvardia, and farewell summer

This started with some lipstick-colored salvia flowers I picked this afternoon.  As I gathered them, I also gathered some wild, white asters I call Farewell Summer. Put them in a wine glass, but they seemed to need a punch, so I added pink bouvardia flowers.

I picked a couple of these bouvardia flowers fresh (from plants in pots outside) but a couple were recycled from Oct. 5 arrangement. I'm amazed at how well they hold up as cut flowers.

October 14, 2012 -- pink flowers in bird's nest

What a fabulous weekend for gardening! Can't remember when I had more hours to devote to it all in one weekend. Such a luxury! This afternoon, after pulling weeds (if you call cutting down volunteer trees 15 feet tall "pulling weeds") I trolled the garden for pretty things to cut and wound up with a handfull of pink flowers--zinnias, mums, and snapdragons. I walked them into the house and found a spice jar to drop them into, but its glass surface seemed too "hard" for them. John had given me a bird's nest yesterday, so I wrapped the glass jar in the bird's nest.

There's also one old green hydrangea blossom in this.

October 13, 2012 -- mushroom

I like this little arrangement. It's a mushroom I found under a maple tree combined with some sheet moss I harvested from the garden. It took me a couple of trys to find the best way to display this. It looked silly in a bottle. This little square vase was perfect: its marbled color was just earthy enough to suit the materials and its opening could accommodate the moss and the mushroom stem. This is all sitting on a little black tile.

October 12, 2012 -- same container

This is the same container I used yesterday, but with different materials in it (and sitting on a different windowsill).  I knew I wanted to put it up higher, so its wire frame would show better, so I trolled the garden for something that would trail down. In the process of finding that (climbing spinach), I also found the orange Japanese lanterns, a sprig of pokeweed berries, and some pretty, yellowish grape vine leaves.

Hope you can see the red maple coloring up in the background.

October 11, 2012 -- helianthus

Yesterday was the first day I FORGOT to do a windowsill arrangement! Just too much going on at Flower Camp, where I'm nature journaling with friends. This container is one Rhonda Roebuck gave me: a miniature milk bottle in a wire frame. Very cute. In it are a couple of sprigs of brown hydrangea and yellow helianthus flowers.

October 9, 2012 -- more pyracantha berries

The brightness of yesterday's pyracantha berries made me want to use more of them today, so I shredded some stems of their berries and popped them into this stemmed glass. It took more berries than I'd imagined, and on my way back from gathering more, I found this yellow maple leaf hanging in a shrub.

October 8, 2012 -- leftovers: pyracantha berries, farewell summer, etc.

I had pulled the flowers in the second photo together when I realized the berries, leaves, and flowers leftover in the sink (remnants from the larger arrangement) appealed to me more than the big mass in the windowsill. So: below are some leftover pyracantha berries in a vanilla bottle with just one sprig of farewell summer (a white aster) and one marigold leaflet.

Below is the bigger arrangement (which includes some basil and marigold flowers in addition to farewell summer and pyracantha berries).