1st November, 2021

 

Hello all,

Last Friday we had an extreme weather event with wind speeds in excess of 150 km/h, as a result of which trees fell, roofs were blown and thousands of homes were left without power. We fared quite well with just a couple of power interruptions. We even had internet. 

In anticipation of this severe weather, I went out the previous day and cut a number of roses and some branches of my mollis azalea, which would have been badly damaged by the winds and rain. Above is an arrangement with 2 mollis azalea stems and some cumquats in a ceramic vase. And below is another arrangement with a mollis azalea branch and strelitzia reginae flowers in a ceramic container.

As for the roses that I cut, I made a large mass of pink and red roses (about 18 flowers all together) and a number of ornithogulums in this tall structure made of dried corkscrew willow (Salix matsudana 'Tortusa'). I attached all the pieces together, creating a kind of cradle into which I placed a tsubo vase to accommodate the flowers.

Down the road from our house, I discovered a clump of agapanthus that had on it all three growing stages at the same time - buds, a flower and seed heads. Needless to say, that's quite unusual and I was compelled to cut them and arrange them. I bought the cute ceramic container in Vietnam.

The ornithogulums have done extremely well this year and are very useful in ikebana, both for their beauty and their versatility. The flower head is made up of multiple individual flowers with the characteristic black ovary in the centre of each. They are ideal as a mass and are long lasting but they also have long stems, which I like to manipulate to create curves. In the arrangement, below, I used two flowers with similar curved stems and three loquat leaves, which I kept low so as not to obscure the curved stems.

My student, Mary, has just graduated to Book 3 of the curriculum, with her first lesson being 'A Vertical Arrangement'. She, certainly, did justice to it, using spuria iris and mollis azalea in a ceramic suiban.

For many years I have been nursing a straggling plant of Stipa gigantea, a tufted, evergreen grass, which brings long spires of golden, oat like flower panicles in spring and summer. I was beginning to despair of it ever flowering until this year. You can't imagine my delight at the first flower, which, of course, I had to cut as soon as it reached its peak of golden colour. It is such a light material that the breese created by simply walking past it is enough to cause it to flutter in a most charming way.

Stipa gigantea, altissimo rose and ornithogulum

Bye for now,

Emily