In a Generational Vase on Monday

Dusk caught me unawares yesterday afternoon – with sunset officially occuring at about 4.00, I shouldn’t have been surprised, although it still seemed light as I finished cutting up the prunings from R Cécile Brunner (with only the teeniest bit of shed roof clambering required…) and headed inside for a cup of tea and piece of cake… to remember I hadn’t prepared for IAVOM!

Welcome to the 10th anniversary of IAVOM, a meme which commenced on an inauspicious November Monday, with the sole purpose of encouraging me to pick flowers or other material from the garden on a regular basis. It must have worked because, ten years and 520 vases later, it is still going. My favourite vase from each of the last 12 months is shown in the collage below – July presented the hardest choice!

No prizes for guessing what some of the contents of today’s vase will be – blooms from my gifted rescue plant, Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’! With so many blooms and autumn closing in around the garden, it is not surprising I chose to grab them while I could. Having already taken some with me to the voluntary work I do, I added them to the remains of the previous posy I had taken there, stems of Chrysanthemum ‘Emperor of China’. They made a surprisingly pleasing combination, so I decided to replicate this at home, adding foliage of Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’ and stems of Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’. My cornus, unlike those of Cathy at Words and Herbs in Bavaria, still retain their foliage, so I snipped all the leaves from the stems apart from the topmost pair.

Today’s vase is a simple trio: single stems of Rhododendron ‘Cheers’, an unlabelled sedum (hylotelephium) and slightly bedraggled Miscanthus ‘Red Chief’. The rhododendron grows on the fringe of the woodland, in my direct line of sight on rambles around the garden, so I could hardly fail to notice when the first blooms appeared; now, more and more buds are opening and they are such pretty blooms that I thought I would try them out in a vase. The sedum (which probably does have a label tucked at its base somewhere), is planted in a border nearby and has relatively dark blooms that seem to pick out the centres of the rhododendron, as does the miscanthus, the latter proving immensely useful in late-season vases.

Intergenerational gardening lets older people and children come together for their mutual benefit. Intergenerational gardening is a great way for children to learn, and offers older adults an important role in mentoring and teaching them, as well as some fun and pleasant company.

I have no doubt mentioned a number of times that I have been very lax in supporting my dahlias this year, inevitably resulting in a number of casualties. By way of excuse, I have been awaiting a supply of stakes from a friend whose husband coppices for a local farmer, stakes cut a number of months ago apparently, waiting in their garage and on the point of being dropped off here any time now – or at least that was my friend’s intention! At least if I receive them soon they will be ready for next year and I can have them in place when the tubers are first planted out again, as is probably recommended by professional growers!

Succumbing to the urge to move unusually lanky aster Symphyotrichum‘Little Carlow’ today instead of waiting till it was dormant, I also moved the sanguisorba I featured in a vase a few weeks ago, and again today, a little nearer the fence. Whilst doing so, I realised the label read Sanguisorba dodecandra and not S canadensis as I had thought. Googling doesn’t tell me a lot about the former, and illustrations suggest it looks more like the latter, so it remains a bit of a puzzle. The aster looks all the better with something behind it and, having dug it out with a large rootball, doesn’t look any the worse for its experience; the sanguisorba, however, is now glowering at me and I cut a few flowering stems for today’s vase rather than leave them to a potentially slow demise on the plant.

Last week I chose random blooms for my Monday vase, blooms that had missed out on being featured; this week I am choosing (mostly) blooms with shorter stems, blooms that have missed out to others such as dahlias, which could otherwise easily dominate vases from June to October.

Having decided to pick blooms that had not been included in a vase this year, not because they were not vase-worthy but more due to the seasonal abundance, I toyed for a while with different titles – Waifs and Strays? Pigs Ear? – but the ease of finding a prop meant that Random Selection, like the blooms, made the cut.

The starting point for today’s Monday vase was the tall spires of Sanguisorba canadensis. I am rather puzzled by them and can’t remember where and when I got the original plant, which was in the main blue & white border. It must have been over five years ago and I recall it flowering just once, but not leaving me impressed, especially as it began to spread without earning its keep. Last autumn, when I lifted all the contents of the border, I composted most of it, but planted a small section in an adjacent border, where it is now flowering generously. I have no idea why I wasn’t impressed before, because the flowers are gorgeous, six inches (15cms) plus of greenish-white fluffiness on each spike; the plant is exceedingly tall, I know,  more than its supposed five feet (1.5m), and thereby taller than me. I am not intimidated by tall people these days, but I do avoid the tallest of plants in my garden. However, I will overlook this failing on the strength of its blooms, albeit not literally!

In this case, it was the egg, as that is what I found myself thinking of when I picked today’s blooms…

I am probably doing the Duchess a great injustice by implying she is a floozy, as I don’t know her well enough, but when you are such a lovely shade of deep purply blue that you become the focus of a vase on Monday, then perhaps you need to be big enough to allow people to take liberties with your reputation.