A Gallery of Autumn Bouquets from a Single Vegetable to Crow's Beak Yellow Flowers

All of a sudden, now autumn has really arrived, there's  a whole new palette of flowers and foliage to cut and bring inside. Like this silly looking buzz-top of an artichoke in a Larry Halvorsen cream pitcher, many are already drying out there in the garden.Unlike the artichoke with its rubbery purple top-knot, most don't have so much character that they're a stand alone arrangement.   (The zebra-striped Halvorsen pottery doesn't hurt the effect...)

It's time to pick mophead hydrangeas when you can see the leaves start to take on a leathery quality. It means they're ready to dry without withering. Simply cut, and arrange loosely in a vase or bowl (no crowding or they'll end up misshapen) with a little bit of water just touching the ends of the stems. As the water evaporates, the hydrangeas slowly dry, often mellowing into richer shades of grape and wine as they dessicate. Which is an ugly word for a process that creates such beauty - in the case of hydrangeas, anyway....

The petals on the sea-blue hydrangea have reached just the right degree of leatheriness to dry perfectly (I hope)...the more mauvey ones have already browned a bit - I should have picked them last week...

You just want a little bit of water over the stems, to help them withdraw from moisture slowly enough not to wither -

I love how the flowers change as they dry, each becoming more uniquely themselves and richer in color. Kind of like what we hope will happen to us as we age...

This bouquet was inspired by the school bus yellow of the crow's beak on the olive oil tin (I snipped off the lid after finishing up the contents)....I picked every yellow flower I could still find out there (Black-eyed Susans, helenium, yarrow) and added some stems of pineapple sage for fragrance and contrast...sometimes the best vases are ones you fashion out of something else altogether; a vase, after all, is anything that'll hold water...

 

 

 

 

Comments

[DariaW]

It's also possible to bump the color of dried hydrangeas a bit using Kool Aid disolved in rubbing alcohol.