Hyacinths For a Rainy Day - It's All In the Mix of Store Bought and Fresh Picked

One of my favorite tasks, preparing
Flowers for the vases, cutting
Stems for fresh mouths, wreathing
The room in sweet odor, rinsing
Grit from the crevices, thinking
Somewhere someone still farms flowers in soil. Thankfully.

And from the blog Slow Love Life "Hyacinths in April"

An old glass brick from a salvage store makes the perfect vase when the bottoms of flowers are nearly as interesting as their tops...it's almost as if the vase becomes a fish tank, or a curio cabinet when the stems are magnified under the water...

I bought these hyacinths at Metropolitan Market on Queen Anne hill;  and when I unwrapped them I was struck by how much the stems, with their white, flared ends, looked more like leeks, an illusion made more striking seen through the thick glass of the vase. 

$8.99 for five stems struck me as reasonable on a rainy day when the hyacinths in my garden aren't yet in bloom... somehow, the price amortizes my keen anticipation to step out and have yellow and purple, as well as these peachy-orange 'Gypsy Queens' to cut and bring inside.

But the hyacinths alone, despite their strong, ethereal fragrance, weren't quite enough - they looked stubbornly store-bought no matter how much I moved them about in the vase. So I admitted it was time to prune the Spirea japonica 'Magic Carpet', for its new little bronze leaves are just the right color to flatter the flowers. The mix of cut-from-the-garden twigs and voluptuous flowers is now perfuming my entire yoga studio with the sweet smell of early springtime.

Comments

[Karen]

The Hyacinths are such a beautiful color and the cuttings from your garden harmonize so perfectly! A very pretty arrangement. xx

[Chris]

Like a Sandra Lee bouquet!! :} Very pretty!