4th July, 2022

 

Hello all,

I, absolutely, love this red camellia. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out its name. Apart from the perfection of the flowers, I love its pendulous form. The arrangement, above, is an example of using one kind of material. I confess, this material makes the exercise easy.

In my travels this morning, I came across an early flowering cootamundra wattle and brought a small amount home. I also had a few small plants of amaranthus, which had self seeded and which Sam removed when he was clearing the vegetable patch. I couldn't let them go to waste. So, I put them together in a brightly coloured ceramic vase.

I was quite late in pruning the hydrangeas and, whilst the flowers on most of them were quite dead, one shrub still had some quite beautiful, autumnal coloured flowers as well as leaves. Another example of using only one kind of material.

On Saturday, as I sat on the garden bench having lunch, I noticed how the branches of my Prunus mume, Japanese Flowering Apricot, intermingled with the New Zealand flax that is growing below it. 

This inspired me to make an arrangement using these two, rather disparate materials.

I've been watching my garrya elliptica for some weeks now, waiting for the catkins to be long enough to be suitable for ikebana. The wall arrangement is ideal for this, as it provides the height from which the material can hang as low as it needs to. The delicate catkins are quite lovely but they are rather dull in colour, hence the brightly coloured camellias.

Mary's class theme was 'Sketching and Arranging'. In this exercise students are required to look carefully at their material and sketch what the arrangement they visualise. More often than not, the resulting arrangement is quite different from the one in the students' mind and, therefore, in the sketch. This is perfectly fine as it illustrates how much the materials dictate just how they will be used. The sketch is for the student's use only.

As I wrote the date at the top of this post, I noticed that it is the 4th of July and, therefore, American Independence Day. I would like to wish my American readers a very happy 4th of July.

Bye for now,

Emily