In a Vase on Monday: Sultry Serendipity

When I set off into the garden yesterday to pick materials for today’s vase, I fully expected to come back with a little posy and certainly not a bunch, Winter not being quite as generous in her offerings as other seasons of the year are.

Blooms are almost non-existent in the garden at the moment after several days of frost, but I had two options: another pelargonium from the Coop, or stems of the overwintering Salvia ‘Phyllis Fancy’ in the working greenhouse. The latter, which never made it back into a border last year after its previous overwintering, remaining in its pot in disgrace, won the toss. After continued underperformance, I have been on the point of banishing it altogether, but now plan to give it a reprieve, albeit keeping it in a pot rather than giving it border space. However, I am not holding my breath…

Although bubblewrapping the Coop in the middle of last week was abandoned after less than an hour, due to numb fingers, there was enough time to notice that two of my 2022 purchases of dwarf pelargoniums were in full bloom and looking surprisingly pretty, considering the time of year. This knowledge was stored in my head and formed the basis of today’s vase, with a single white bloom of P ‘David John’ forming the focal point. He was joined by three stems of Argyranthemum ‘Grandaisy Pink’ (now in the Coop too) and a clutch of foliage from Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’. The latter is in dire need of pruning, but for the time being I shall just remain selective about where I snip any foliage from!

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.

A busy weekend meant today’s vase had to be prepared and a post written even further in advance than usual, and it will be brief.

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.