Hello all,

I'm happy to report that things are slowly getting back to normal. My surgeon is very happy with my progress and I have now discarded my clunky footwear, which was reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster. I am now wearing my husbands's oversized thongs (flip flops for my American readers). It will be some time before I will be able to wear the pretty shoes that I have been imagining at the end of this ordeal but, now that I am mobile, I don't mind the wait.

I will be starting classes next week, which means my work will be mainly restricted to the class themes, so I'm making the most of this time of playing with freestyles using whatever I can find around me.

There is a carob tree in my sister's street that I've been admiring for some time. I love the way the long, bean-like pods hang below the branches which grow almost horizontally. Driving past recently, I noticed a large branch had broken and was hanging by a little bit of bark. It had to be rescued and, with the help of the trusty saw in my car boot, I did just that.

Below are the two arrangements that were created, using the carob branches for the first and just the pods for the second.

And speaking of finding, I came across fennel growing wild and Osage oranges near by. I thought I'd use them together as shown below.

Inside and out this glass container

One Osage orange and one agapnthus

Two days later, the fennel had died, since it was not in water, so I removed it and replaced it with other material.

 

Now with agave

I went into the garden at night to cut the agave and I found this
dear little frog that measures only 3 cm in length.

Now with clivias

This time of year the agapanthus in my garden are flowering profusely and I love to use them. I'm including a photo of the garden bed  in which they grow. I had tried growing all sorts of annuals in this spot before the agapanthus but nothing survived because there were two mature pine trees growing there. My sister in law, Toula had initially given me a number of agapanthus plants and later I added to them, thus filling the whole bed.

Fresh and dry agapanthus

The difficulty in this simple arrangement was working out the mechanics that
would allow the stems with the heavy flowers to come out of the small
 opening without resting on the sides.

There is a small casuarina tree near my house that produces interesting hanging stems that lend themselves well to ikebana.

In this wall arrangement I used sunflowers, crab apples
and the casuarina that comes forward as well as
cascading down

Here I used two cascading materials - the casuarina and the amaranthus,
which I grow in my garden

Until next time,
Emily