A Freckled Lily, Sweet Peas, and a Snow White Poppy....

  Every morning now when I go out in the garden to cut flowers for the house, I'm thrilled by the abundance of choices. Lilies or sweet peas? Roses or the striped helenium just coming into bloom?  It's only a few weeks of the year when we suffer such a delicious dilemma.  Such bounty is heady, made more precious because it's so fleeting. Many more months I'll be searching high and low for pods, cones, branches, buds and a bloom or two to bring inside....

I started out this week with fragrant sweet pea bouquets for the house and a larger, yet still simple bunch of flowers for the yoga studio. Masses of sweet peas in varying colors are perfection just plopped into a vase, with perhaps a little rearranging of shades. Be sure and cut their stems again right before they go into the vase's cool water...it'll help them to last for five days instead of three.

For the bigger bouquet I stuck to just three kinds of flowers; the warm, earthy color of the yarrow (Achillea millefolium 'Terra Cotta') is a supporting player the Asiatic lily 'Kentucky', and single, white blossom of matilija poppy (Romneya coulteri). I asore this ethereal perennial, which grows like a weed on abandoned hillsides, but I've tried to grow it for years and never succeeded until I planted it in a raised bed (good drainage) in a warm, sunny spot and left it alone to colonize...

Here's a gathering of vases...

I believe the lily is 'Kentucky', an especially large Asiatic hybrid that almost makes up for its lack of perfume with its rich color and multiple freckles.

Comments

[Karen]

So bright and colorful, and those vases are gorgeous. xx

[Chris]

Simply beautiful! Wow, I have never seen that white poppy...would love to have some seeds from it, if you want to part with any...it's gorgeous! I love white flowers!!

[gout home treatment]

Lily is a sweet name for a lovely flower to be displayed for interior designing. The longevity of this flower is good that it stays for a week.