Plant Talk

Plant Materials? Floral Designer? Really???

Do the word pairings of  "plant materials" and "floral design" irritate you as much as they irritate me?

I'm emboldened in my rant by the words of 89 year old Seattle landscape archited Richard Haag at a recent talk he gave to the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture at a conference in Austin Texas. “The term plant materials should be banished from our vocabulary. Plants are not materials. They are living organisms.”

Yes, exactly!! It always sounds so pretentious to me - or maybe ignorant - yet so many people refer to living, breathing, growing plants as "plant material' - as if they are one indistinguishable mass, inert as a couch or roll of wallpaper. And why use two words when one - plants - does a more precise and honest job?

Then there are those who refer to themselves as "floral designers". We're talking about people who arrange flowers, yes? Flowers are miracles of nature, the sex organs of plants, painted by the finest artists on the planet for centuries....how can we ever improve on them by "designing" with them?? 

There are true designers, who using nature as a muse, create something totally new and different, like Portland florist Francoise Weeks...see a story about her amazing work here. That's her pink flower purse, left: she also composes shoes, hats, and magical woodland creations out of vegetables, flowers, fruit, bark and a variety of botanicals she picks up at markets and clips from the garden.

But "bouquet maker" or even "flower arranger" although that sounds a little stiff, would better describe what most of us are up to.

What I love most about bringing flowers, leaves, bits and pieces in from the garden and plunking them into a vase is their individual shapes and colors, the sense of nature and wildness they bring with them. Don't you hate to see flowers arranged artifically, overstuffed, wired or  sticking up rigidly out of a frog in the bottom of the vase? I want them to tilt and bend and cross, just like they do in the garden. The last thing a bouquet needs is over-thinking, overworking...designing....let the flowers speak for themselves. Which, like this black-bee-centered delphinium, they do quite eloquently.

 

 

 

Bouquet-Making Party Inspires Guests To Get Out In the Garden and Cut

Three moms of students at Lakeside school used my bouquet-making book, "Petal & Twig" to raise money for their kids' school.The April 21st event was oversubscribed - love that they billed it as a "BYOC". Here's the listing in the Lakeside auction catalog:
 
Petal & Twig: A Morning of Simple & Creative Flower Arranging
Please join Master Gardener and Lakeside parent Kelli Curtis in her Kirkland garden. Kelli and her apprentices, fellow Lakeside parents Lora Mason and Karen Summerville, have been inspired by Seattle garden writer Valerie Easton, whose book 'Petal and Twig: Seasonal Bouquets with Blossoms, Branches, and Grasses from Your Garden' shows how to create simple flower arrangements from your garden. Each participant will receive a copy of Easton's book at the auction. At the event itself - rain or shine - you will be treated to brunch and some time in Kelli's garden to clip to your heart's content, then create a few flower arrangements with vases/containers from the hosts' stash or with those you bring yourself. BYOC! (Bring Your Own Clippers!)

At $75.00 per person, they ended up oversubscribed, with twelve attending rather than the original 8 people they'd envisioned. And despite a rainy April Sunday, I hear from Lora that people had great fun, starting with pansy-bedecked mimosas at brunch, then a tour of Kelli's garden, followed by clipping and arranging flowers.  
 
"We had a collection of about 40 vases procured from our school rummage sale and from our own stash. Some people brought their own. Kelli’s big teak table under an awning on her patio was a great work space. A couple of guests of  were very hesitant about cutting from the garden, lest they hurt the plant or ruin the beauty, but then they saw that small cuttings hardly made a difference outside, but when placed in a pretty vase mixed with some other things, made a wonderful  arrangement to bring indoors," wrote Lora.

Which is exactly the message of "Petal & Twig" - experiment, play around, be creative, enjoy the textures, and colors of leaves and flowers up close, and your garden probably could use a little pruning anyway!

Lora kindly sent me the photos of the event below....and ended her email with "We really enjoyed this community-building event, bringing together a group of people from our school to practice what you have written about in your wonderful book! Thank you for the inspiration!"

I'm inspired by how these women not only came up with an original and effective fund-raising idea, but used "Petal & Twig" as the basis for a creative morning in the garden with friends...

Starting out with inspiration and mimosas...

Let the cutting begin...

Sheer creativity...looks so fun to have so many leaves and flowers to choose from...I'm sure the women inspired each other as they worked...

I bet if you'd asked these women before the party, they would have said they didn't know how to arrange flowers...and look at these beautiful bouquets....I think and hope that this innovative fund-raiser created a dozen new fearless flower arrangers....

The Intense Colors of Spring......In a Teapot Bouquet

Spring isn't just pastel - you can play up the more intense colors of the season by gathering them together into a bouquet. In the garden they tend to get watered down by all the pale sweetness of springtime.

Two flame-colored tulips in a slim, matte-black vase is about as simple as you can get. Out in the garden, these tulips were just two of many...indoors they become as precious as the exotic butterflies they resemble when set off by the inky black of the vase.

I picked these violet lunaria flowers out in the alley where they grow like weeds. Few flowers are less precious, but a bunch in a vase look strikingly irridescent despite their weedy qualities. The teapot color matches the bronze tones of the bouquet. Spent hellebores (which last much longer cut than when they're first blooming), 'Magic Carpet' spirea, and orange tulips, along with a few sprigs of the lunaria, create a rich mix of shades and textures.

I

Out with the pussywillows I'd enjoyed in this vase since early-February, and in with branches of old-fashioned Japanese flowering quince (Chaenomeles Japonica). These gawky, thorny, awkward shrubs have such exquisitely beautiful flowers , they're at their best cut and brought indoors (or painted on a Japanese or Chinese screen, a popular Asian motif for centuries). I've always loved the old-fashioned coral quince blossoms the best, and gleaned these boughs out in the alley today too - it pays to take your long handled clippers along on your morning walk...

 

 

 

 

Three Variations on a Theme - Spring Green and Sweet Fragrances

For the garden show opening party at Museo Gallery, I figured green flowers and foliage would look quintessentially garden-esque and fresh for spring. But then I saw some still-in-the-bud peach-colored hyacinths that smelled so intensely fragrant that I couldnt' resist. After all, what would a spring bouquet be without sweet fragrance?

The wallflowers (Erysimum 'Winter Orchid' which is my new favorite for its brilliant color and honey scent), hellebores, and various euphorbia are all cut from the garden...I tried to add some fresh fern fonds but they just didn't work with the other foliages.

So here's the trio of arrangements all made with the same idea in mind, but some ended up more colorful than others. The little, wallflower-heavy arrangement on the left in the green vase is for the dining room table, the middle one is for the yoga studio, and the greenest one with the hyacinths is for Museo's big opening party (this Saturday evening, 5-7 p.m. - you're all invited). I love playing around with repetition and variation between vases, so they're all related, yet unique...here the common elements are green flowers and foliage...

'Winter Orchid' wallflowers (wish your screen was scratch-and-sniff), the new coppery foliage on Spirea 'Magic Carpet', hellebores, and dark Euphorbia 'Red Wing', in an apple-green vase...

I think this variegated, red-stemmed euphorbia is E. X martinii 'Ascot Rainbow' - the red stems are so good with the darkest wallflower blossoms.

The largest bouquet is all in shades of chartreuse - hypericum berries, 'Wulfenii' euphorbia, hellebores. Except for those irresistable hyacinths which add a touch of peach and plenty of fragrance. I tried yellow, black, and cream vases; they all detracted rather than added to the effect. I wished I had a wide, matte green vase (seems like I can always imagine just the right vase, and it's rarely one I have at hand...) I ended up using a rectangular glass vase, and the simple geometry of it played off the rounded euphorbia and hellebore shapes.

 

Hellebores and Daffodils - Winter and Spring Meet and Mingle in a Vase...

The pale prettiness of daffodils pairs beautifully with saucer-shaped, dark-petalled hellebores. I can hardly wait until the daffodils begin blooming in my garden - only about 3 weeks out if it ever warms up a bit. I eased the anxiety of waiting  by buying three bunches of varied narcissus (3 for $10) from Whole Foods this week. My favorite slim, white ceramic vase (by Whidbey artist Inge Roberts) seems just right with the frilly intricacy of the more colorful narcissus.I love their crimped and crinkled look - somehow these ruffled cup narcissus look both primped-for-the-prom and gardenesque...as if I could have just picked them....if only...

Look into the heart of this gorgeous daffodil - a reminder that the spring equinox is just 27 days off....that's nearly the cusp of spring, isn't it??

The plain, paler daffs looked too relentlessly spring-like, and just too sweet, for a chill February day. So I added winter to the vase with a few hellebore hybrids picked fresh from the garden. I split the stems up a few inches so they'd soak up water and stay perky for a few days. The patterened stoneware vase is heavy enough to ground the bouquet in winter, yet not so heavy as to detract from the daffodil's promise of spring to come...

The beauty of these dark-toned hellebores is more effective close up indoors in the vase than disappearing in the dim winter light in the still-mostly-brown garden...

A Mid-Winter Day Calls for the Simplest Flowers - A Reassurance of Spring to Come

How often simple is best - I need to remind myself of that. The gray day (is anything bleaker than a gray day in early February when you're starting to hope for spring??) called for simplicity. What I needed as reassurance of warmer, lighter days to come was nothing more than a wash of color, color you can sink into, uninterrupted color; the sweet scent of the stock ($3.95 a bunch at Trader Joe's) almost cloying but not quite, was a plus.

The hearty, sturdy shape and color of the butter yellow vase, its matte-as-tree-bark finish, seemed just right for the soft, gray-green stems of lavender stock and the quiet voluptuousness of the blossoms. The vase is my current favorite; it's from Room and Board and comes not only in this satisfyingly saturated yellow, but also a cooler, sophisticated periwinkle blue.

Of course, I couldn't help but imagine a few fronds of autumn fern stuck in there for texture, or maybe some pussy willow for height...no, leave it alone. Why do we always make things more complicated than they need to be?And what can you possibly need on a gray day besides flowers and books?? Well, mabey a cup of tea....

 

November Bouquet - Blurring the Lines Between Garden Fresh and Store Bought

Autumn is well and truly upon us; this 'Forest Pansy' redbud in Langley Village is barely holding on to the last of its leaves beneath moody twilight skies.

Between mid-November, when the garden is well and truly soaked, and February when early bulbs and hellebores bloom, we no longer have the luxury of stepping out into the garden to cut a bouquet. It's time to augment with store-bought.

Sure, the sasanqua camellias are starting to bloom, and there's evergreen foliage out there...but if you want to make a decent sized bouquet, with contrast and color,  the trick is to figure out how to combine store bought and home grown. Subtlety is key - an emphasis on texture, or tone-on-tone colors.

I bought flowers for the first time since April for this bouquet I made for Museo's Gallery's November opening party. I combined glossy orange berries (no idea what they might be) with red/orange dahlias from the grocery store (the most gardenesque-looking flowers I could find). I'm not yet ready for winter staples like lilies or tulips (really, I saw the first bunch of tulips at Metropolitan Market last week. They look so wrong in autumn...)

I had to stick the materials from the garden right into the sink to wash the spiders and their sticky webs off...callicarpa and hypericum berries, and the last hydrangeas from the garden.

I got off to a discouraging start trying to figure out how to combine so many rigidly upright, stick-like elements in one bouquet.....far too awkward and stiff...

The yellow pitcher, which I loved with summer flowers, looks too bright and obvious now. The subdued autumn colors of berry and leaf, stem and twig, look more at home in this copper colored raku cylinder (below).  The dahlias were bugging me...I needed one more element...an ornamental cabbage cut from a pot on the front porch (bottom right) did the trick...

But the various elements didn't really come together in a satisfying way, and the dahlias started withering withered around the edges - it's always hard to tell how fresh store bought flowers are. Not so fresh, in this case.

So I brewed a fresh cup of tea, put on some music, and plopped everything out of the vase. Time to re-envision and start over. I re-cut stems, discarded the dahlias, and took a long look at what I had to work with. I also cut more of the little ornamental cabbages, sheared all the lower leaves off so the stems were nice and long.

I ended up with an arrangement that features the berries that were obscured by the fluff of flowers in the earlier version...looks like a bird buffet bouquet to me...

I'm much happier with its more quiet, autumnal nature... Isn't it amazing how much better the cabbages look cut for the vase than growing in a pot?

 

 

 

Autumn Bouquet Abundance - The Garden Is Still Producing Flowers, Grasses, Pods, and Berries

I nearly broke down and bought flowers for a big bouquet I was making for Museo Gallery's opening party last weekend (It's the very cool Dot Show that'll run through October....).

I was afraid that with such chilly nights and nearly 80 days without useful rain, the garden would be depleted of good material to create something big and showy for the party.  But once I went outside with open eyes, looking high and low, I was amazed at the garden's continued vibrancy.

You can see the raw ingredients piled up on my kitchen counter (above) - I love that moment of perfect possibility, when I'm pondering vase options, with clippers and a mound of flowers and foliage at hand...

Here's the finished bouquet...

A fat, faded-to-chartreuse head of 'Annabelle' hydrangea anchors the arrangement. Sprays of sweetly fragrant flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata) echo the color of the hydrangea. Achillea 'Terracotta' is warmly russet, Verbena bonariensis and sea oats grass (Chasmanthium latifolium) add texture and vertical line, and the spent, dark, curvy bugbane (Actea simplex) flowers are one of those bonuses you find if you aren't too quick to tidy your garden in autumn.

The flat, rusty pink heads of Sedum 'Autumn Joy', a few single, golden dahlias, hypericum berries, and the showy tri-colored foliage of a fancy-leafed geranium complete the bunch....I chose a heavy, dark ceramic vase for ballast, as the overall look is pretty airy despite the hydrangea head. And the vase gives visual weight to such a motley bunch of materials. There's some puffy Japanese lanterns (Physalis alkekengi) just showing color in there too although you can't see them in this photo.

Here are some close-ups...

I don't know why, but it was when I added the tall stems of nicotiana, with the sweet little pale flowers, that the whole bouquet came together....go figure....arranging flowers is always one big, joyful experiment...

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...

 

 

 

 

Sunflowers and Violet Dahlias Transformed from Raw Materials to Art Gallery Bouquet

What inspires your bouquet-making? The changing palette of flowers and foliage outside our doors is a constant spur to pick and arrange, but sometimes we need a nudge from store bought flowers or a neighbor's garden to kick-start creativity....to keep ourselves interested and our work fresh.

Last weekend I started with a couple of big bunches of solid yellow sunflowers from Trader Joe's ($5.99 a bunch) chosen because they so perfectly match my favorite Le Creuset pitcher, and because they were large, bold, and inexpensive, important ingredients for a bouquet I planned to make for an art opening in Langley.

Here they are on their own in the yellow pitcher, combined with some flowers from the garden in a kitchen still-life.

The next morning, I went out clippers in hand to find fragrance, color contrast, and some airier foliage and flowers to combine in a big bouquet for Museo Gallery's September opening party.

It's all about the yin and yang of playing off the strongest element in a bouquet, adding some fluff and fragrance...I'd spotted some  intensely violet, seriously ruffled dahlias in a neighbor's garden the night before, and asked if I could pick a few. I added tall, skinny Verbena bonariensis, an artichoke, rudbeckia, spent green flower pods, burgundy fountain grass, and flat-topped golden achillea to the mix. And tall, curvy white wands of honey-scented Cimicifuga 'Brunette'. I think gathering the raw materials is my favorite part of the process.

This is certainly the best moment, when everything is cut and waiting. All is potential and possibility....just be prepared for editing, discarding, making a mess, trying again, discarding, more editing, and plenty of waste. A cup of tea, a broom, dustpan and good music help.

Here's the final bouquet in place at Museo.You need a really heavy vase to hold and balance out the  weight, both actually and visually, of the fat dahlias and thick-stemmed sunflowers.

The painting is one of LIsa Snow Lady's scenes of architecture and landscape in Langley and around Puget Sound. Her mastery of light is so beautiful...sunlight falling on old buildings and gardens....her work is complimented (speaking of yin and yang) by organically shaped and brilliantly colored glass vessels by Takuya Tokizawa - and yes, some would work beautifully as vases. The show continues through September...it'll be lucky if the flowers last 'til Thursday...