A BIRTHDAY IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS

Hello all,

Yes, I'm celebrating a birthday during these unusual times. And, no, there won't be an outing to a nice restaurant surrounded by family and friends. However, I've been spoiled by my family despite the restrictions.

The grandchildren made gifts for me including ikebana arrangements, knowing how much that would please me.

Hermione made this with her assistant, Althea and
brought it ready made

Xavier made this with some assistance from yiayia

Aria made this miniature arrangement with assistance
from yiayia.

And, despite the fact that there was no cake, my daughter, Madeline, made Greek style, rice pudding last night and my beloved went and picked it up for me, so I could eat it warm, just the way I like it. And today my daughter-in-law, Jeannine, made loukoumathes, Greek honey puffs, and brought a platter full for us to share. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed both. To paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara, I won't think about the weight gain today. I'll think about it tomorrow.

And on to the garden and ikebana. I've mentioned this before but Autumn in Melbourne is glorious. Below are just two of my trees in vibrant colours.

Japanese maple

Non astringent Persimmon (Also known as Fuyu tree)

Like most gardeners, with this enforced isolation, I've been trying to catch up on my gardening. This involves, among other tasks, extensive pruning, which then provides material for ikebana. I used mahonia flowers with the persimmon stem in the arrangement, below. They look stunning when fresh but I'm lucky if they last two days before the flowerettes drop making a mess on the table.

Similarly, with autumn leaves, they seem to have a short life span and tend to drop much quicker than when they are green. My next arrangement illustrates the point very well. It took me a considerable amount of time for a large, autumn arrangement of seven different materials, making it all the more disappointing when they started to drop the very next day.

The few ginkgo petals on the table were on purpose

The next day

My Ginkgo biloba has started to change colour and I cut just a couple of pieces. One for the above arrangement, which had turned a buttery yellow and one for the one, below, which is mostly green. The ginkgo is native to China and it is found in fossils dating back 270 million years. I heard a statistic in a gardening show, recently, that there a specimens in China that are about 1,500 years old. Threatening to rival our Huon Pine in Tasmania.

And now, what to do when your husband removes from the vegetable patch a huge pumpkin vine, with lovely little pumpkins still on it and squashes it into the garden waste bin without so much as a 'could you use any of this?'. You'd think he'd know better by now! What you do is - you rummage inside said bin and try to rescue some of the interesting vine. Below is the only usable piece.

I leave you with this next piece, which came about because I removed the dying leaves and spent flowers of the crocosmia. I kept the seed heads after removing all the leaves and massed them in this interesting ceramic vase. which I won at a raffle. The flowers are Port St John creeper.

Bye for now,

Emily