Well, spring continues to delight me with an abundance of materials just begging to be picked and arranged. I know, I don't HAVE to arrange everything but I want to. All kidding aside, I do leave some flowering plants to just be enjoyed in the garden.
In our area there are a myriad of callistemon trees, all in glorious colour, which I could not resist. I cut some for the arrangement, above and added a large mass of the viburnum opulus flowers, which balanced in volume and contrasted in colour.
In contrast, the ornithogulums in the arrangement, below, were shaped by me. I'm sure I have explained before how I do that but, for my newer readers, I'll explain it again. When the flower bud is quite soft and pliable, before it has had a chance to harden, I bend it and secure it somehow, either with a metal fork, or by tying it in place with some of the leaves of the plant. As it continues to grow, it naturally reaches for the sun, thus creating the curves.
Every year one or two of my hippeastrum stems are damaged, as per the photograph, below. I suspect snails. With so weakened a stem they are difficult to use. In this case I put a wire through the hollow stem to strengthen it and was able to use the flower.
In the arrangement, below, I took advantage of the interesting shapes, which occurred naturally, of the strelitzias reginae. It's the weight of the flowerheads that cause the stem to bend creating a 'neck'. They merely required an appropriate container to showcase them.
I have had a fractious relationship with my wisteria from the very beginning. She has persistently disappointed me by being parsimonious with her flowering. This last winter I pruned her back very hard and she retaliated by producing only three flowers. She will be sorry because I went out and bought myself another one. This time a white Japanese variety. If the new one flowers better, the old one will go!
Anyway, I cut the measly, three racemes and made the wall arrangement, below, with my gorgeous, mollis azalea. (She is definitely in my good books).
The wisteria did not last very long, so I replaced it with stems from my viburnum opulus but kept the mollis azalea.
Then, the mollis azalea died and I replaced it with my favourite rose, the Altissimo.
In last week's post I featured my very first peony flower for the year. I was quite delighted with it and this week I have the second flower from the same plant. However, this second one is noticeably smaller than the first. Still, she's quite lovely. I placed her in a trough style container together with a stem from my kamo-hon-ami camellia. I, very reluctantly, pruned back my precious camellia because it was encroaching on the path which leads to Sam's office. He's been quite patient with me but he, finally, put his foot down. So I made a couple of arrangements with the cuttings.
Below is the second arrangement. It is only one branch and, other than some judicial trimming and the removal of some leaves, I did nothing to it, just placed it in the container. I added some hippeastrum flowers which are just opening and some fragrant, Portuguese laurel racemes, which are also just staring to open.
I have a number of iris starting to burst into flower. The two in the arrangement, below are - on the left the flag/bearded iris and on the right the Louisiana iris. I arranged them in the traditional way in a large suiban.
Bye for now,
Emily
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