Warm Up Spring With Intense Flower Colors....in a Lizard Vase

I think this vase is a lizard...or maybe it's a frog...but I love how it's patterning plays off spring flowers, keeping down the sweetness factor inherent in a bunch of April flowers.

It's so easy to make a pastel bouquet this time of year - lavenders, baby pinks and blues combine with fresh greens and look, well, pretty...but also perhaps a little insipid next to spring's hotter colors. And on gray days we need the heat, don't we?

In this little bunch of flowers, picked this morning and plunked into a Mexican vase, intense purples and chrome yellows combine with orange to crank up the heat...(well, when doesn't orange look good in any bouquet?).

The lively yellow is kale gone to flower...the airy orange flowers are Epimedium x warleyense 'Orange Queen', and I wish I could remember which orange tulips these are, because they're proving to be perennial. Chartreuse euphorbia mediates between extremes of color. The deep purple of the pasqueflower (looks like an anemone with its yellow anthers) is echoed in the little purple flowers of Lunaria annua that I gathered in the alley.

Maybe I'd best not admit that, as I got a comment, no, a rant, on the amazon page for "Petal & Twig", accusing me of being a terrible person and anti-environmentalist for writing about the joys of picking a few flowers along the roadside or alley....well, that's where I found the lunaria, and believe me there's plenty of it spreading around out there....I haven't depleted the population.

The dark burgundy flowers are some kind of wallflower, and their sweet fragrance scents the room....

Here's a close up....

Comments

[Chris]

Wow!! those are some eye-popping colours!! Amazing that you could find all that sizzle this early in the season! Very pretty!! He looks a little like a frog to me but what do I know?? :)
Hey, if flowers are growing along a road or in an alley, they can hardly be rare, endangered natives! Usually they're weeds in disquise and are free for the picking!! :)

[Valerie Easton]

Hi Chris,
That's just how I feel about doing a bit of scavenging for wild (or more likely escaped) flowers and grasses. If you wanted to make a similar comment on the "Petal & Twig" page on amazon, I'd appreciate it...I need some ballast to the very angry, accusing "review".....
Thanks,
Val

[Lynn Wohlers]

I'm all for this color on an overcast day, and I'm all for finding what you may in back alleys and on roadsides. I trust you pick carefully & know what's what. There are always extremists.

[Chris]

I'd love too! :)

[Dghatsnw]

Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to find myself warning someone not to pick the lacy blossoms of poison hemlock when they're in bloom along the trail here, which sounds like it's just plain dangerous to handle, but I pick where I know the county's going to trim, and I pick invasive weeds, like tansy, in massive armfuls. We just don't have many showy natives suitable for picking along the side of the row here. Sambucca racemosa smells too bad.

[Dghatsnw]

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