December 8, 2012 -- broken ornament

This is a Christmas ball that broke as I was decorating the tree. One of my favorites--sort of a peachy color. Enjoyed commemorating it in a windowsill arrangement.

The little leaf in the vase is a tiny hellebore leaf.

December 7, 2012 -- squash with ivy, carnations

I woke up this morning liking my squash filled with ivy better than I did last night. (And I already loved the way this had evolved: reaming out rotten place in the squash providing nesting place for ivy I had weeding out.) Well, this morning's chores yielded another plant material: carnation flowers leftover from long ago. I had left a bucket of them on the back porch, through many frosts, and half of them were dead but half still looked remarkably good, so I spent a while culling through them to salavage the survivors. So squash, ivy, and carnations were all in my awareness when I decided to jam a few carnations into the same opening I'd jammed the ivy into.

December 6, 2012-- oh, my

Oh, my. This is a total mess, and almost impossible to explain. The photo is worse than what's actually in the windowsill. Today I noticed that a winter squash on the back porch was rotting in an interesting way (a perfect circle was forming on its flesh), so I cut that part out of the squash. This made it look like a birdhouse gourd. Later in the day, I was weeding a flower bed and wound up with some rooted ivy I'd pulled  out. It seemed to want to be planted in the circle I'd excavated in the squash. Hence, what you see. Terrible photo, but I'm too tired to improve it.

December 5, 2012 -- berries, cone, etc.

The idea here was for these two little arrangments to be sort of opposites of each other, but it didn't quite work out that way. Vase on the left holds Chinese holly berries with a pinecone on top. Vase on the right holds a sprig of eastern red cedar and some Chinese holly berries.

December 3, 2012 -- Lenten rose roots + leaf

Somehow, while I was gardening, I pulled up a hellebore plant and didn't notice it in my discard pile until late in the day. Too pretty to throw away, so I put it in this bottle. Its roots and leaves appealed to me. Then I added a little satellite "arrangement"-- tinier hellebore leaf with red maple leaf added. The realy payoff of all this was the shadows on the windowsill tonight.

This looked  mighty pretty in the daytime, too. And the red leaf is the same one I used in my arrangment Nov. 9. (red leaf in box of test tubes).

December 2, 2012 -- twilight

I took this photo yesterday afternoon, at twilight. What an amazingly dark blue sky! The flowers in the tubes are yellow violoas, astilbe seed structures, and some hellebore leaflets scavenged from the leaves I used in yerterday's display.

December 1, 2012 -- nest, okra, hellebore foliage, etc.

The platforms for these materials are spools of  woody trellising material I bought at a Michael's but never unwound. In the left spool are okra pods, in the middle spool are hellebore leaves and red cedar foliage, and on the right spool is a bird's nest with an Osage orange in it. I love the "burnt yellow-green" color of the hellebore foliage (which I've dropped into a tube of water in the center of the spool).