Working on a big bouquet for Museo Gallery's August opening tomorrow night (Saturday August 4th, 5-7 p.m.) was pure pleasure today because I had so much raw material to choose from. It's like baking a cake or assembling a casserole - you start out gathering all the ingredients together. In the case of bouquets, that means containers of fresh, cool water filled with freshly clipped flowers, leaves and branches, plus an assortment of vases to choose from. What a way to start the day, with such satisfying, creative decisions to make.
And in this season of garden bounty you must accept that there will be waste - you can't use everything, or your bouquet will be one big mish-mash. The art lies in the edit - clipping here and there, trying this and that, testing out combinations of flowers and vases. Such a delight, when you're sorting through hydrangeas and lilies, fennel blooms and hot red crocosmia, violet buddleia, artichokes and spidery red Lobelia tupa blooms.
Vases need to be sturdy and wide-bottomed to support such heavy bouquets, and hold plenty of water...these fat ceramic pitchers (the yellow is a heavy LeCreuset you'll see used over and over again in "Petal & Twig") are ideal for mid-summer bouquets:
As a relief from the intensity of flowers and scent, I separated out the white 'Annabelle' hydrangea as a cooling, simple element, made more so by sticking a single stem in this slim, ivory matte vase...
If you'd like to see how the bouquet turned out - it was so big and wild (undisciplined? yes, I admit it...) I really couldn't get a decent photo, visit Museo Gallery in Langley for the opening, or over the next few days while the bouquet is fresh....the show is fabulous, with encaustic paintings by David Price and sculpted stones, wrapped stones and other pieces by mixed media artist Deloss Webber.
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Posted by: plant red flowers | December 05, 2012 at 11:33 PM