In a Vase on Monday: a Thousand Splendid Suns

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.

As you know, I prepare my Monday vases the day before so I can schedule them ready for other IAVOMers to link to on Monday morning. Yesterday, however, we had a day out planned, meeting up with dear blogging friend Anna of Green Tapestry and Himself, at Wollerton Old Hall*, so I wanted to pick material before we went out. Despite originally planning to begin with some rudbeckia and build up a posy of late summer sunset shades, I got sidetracked by Dahlia ‘David Howard’, towering above my head, and instead decided to bring him down a peg or two, the change of plan aided by the steady rain that was now falling.

I had hoped to have several long stems of Dahlia ‘Geoffrey Kent’ to place into one of my taller slimmer vases, but it wasn’t to be and instead there are a few stems of varying length with blooms of variable openness, placed into the smallest of my Caithness glass ‘Ebony’ vases with stems of Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ to add grace and movement.

If you’ve ever dreamt of a perfectly coordinated house and garden, you’re in the right place. You can actually plant the right color roses, flowers, and more foliage so that it matches your house just so. It’s all about planning, and this excerpt from The Color of Roses by Danielle Dall’Armi Hahn (Ten Speed Press, $35) will take out the guesswork. Follow these steps if you want to up your curb appeal and make your house the best looking one on the block.

Growing up in Hawai‘i, Meleana Estes was immersed in the traditions of lei making, thanks to her tūtū, or grandmother, a seamstress and costume designer who took up lei making in the 1960s, when traditional Hawai‘ian skills were re-emerging throughout the islands. Her tutu became an expert over the years and passed this knowledge to her family and to Meleana, who, after a career in fashion, went on to become an expert lei maker and teacher of the craft, running workshops first in Honolulu and eventually abroad. 

My perennial Phlox have been a good stalwart flower for cutting and filling a vase this last few weeks. I found the pink colours had more scent but all the Phlox seemed to drink copious amounts of water (I wondered if water and scent were related). The Penstemon in the same vase as the Phlox was not as successful as they had a far shorter life. Another successful long lasting cut flower is the Alstromeria. The Reds performed better than the yellows but both lasted over a week.

If you want to add passion with a hint of romance using plants, here are the best Vines with Heart-Shaped Leaves you can trail on walls!

Marion Brenner

Most of my childhood recollections involve plants, dogs, and being constantly outdoors on the family farm and the Saluda River. This time of year, when my landscape is full of blooming daffodils, I think of my father and the wonderful memory gift he gave me.

…to displaying flowers and foliage in a vase, but that art could be anything from utilising learned floristry techniques to basically plonking them in a receptacle. Perhaps after plonking we might then rearrange them slightly to achieve something we see as more satisfactory, without necessarily recognising why we want to tweak things, or perhaps we might place them a stem at a time to achieve some perceived kind of balance, without having any formal or even informal training in floristry.

Thank you all for your kind words over the last week following the unexpected death of my sister; they were very much appreciated. It has been a strange week and I greatly value the support of our blogging community.