I’ve decided to start a new monthly series, making an arrangement with whatever interesting things I can find in the garden. I don’t know much about flower arranging, as I usually just make a bouquet as I pick, and then stuff the lot into some sort of vase. I follow a landscape designer and writer in the UK named Dan Pearson (he’s had history with such famed gardeners as Beth Chatto), who is married to a photographer called Huw Morgan. Together they’ve created the most amazing website called Dig Delve, an online magazine of sorts for all things plants. They make great arrangements from what they find on their property, but they also had a guest florist named Flora Starkey over several times this past year, and I was fascinated by the way she looked at the garden, chose plants, and composed art. It made me want to cultivate a better eye where these things are concerned. My feeling is that I can read about it all I want, but I won’t learn unless I actually DO the thing, hence this series.
It’s a lovely thing to go out on a somewhat sunny, breezy winter afternoon and search for materials with which to create. I noticed a new-to-me bird at the fountain, which turned out to be a yellow-rumped warbler, which apparently are rather common here in the winter but whom I’ve never noticed. The bees are busy in the blooming manzanita and narcissus, and the chickens are sunning themselves in dusty corners of the run, looking content. Most of the gardening I’ve been doing lately involves winter cleanup, which isn’t sexy and involves a lot of crawling and bending and huffing and sweating, which is another kind of good; it was doubly nice to just take the trug and the secateurs and stroll around in my flip flops (a perk of living in CA during the winter, at least in the afternoons).
It’s fun how much you can find to make an interesting arrangement (as long as you’re not under five feet of snow!). I’ve often said that I try to have flowers every day of the year (for the pollinators), but November and December are the hardest months to do that. January starts the native plants blooming; this is spring (though still quite chilly, it’s when we have rain) for us, and the manzanitas and ceanothus will respond readily, and also the spring bulbs are beginning to come up.
Have any of you taken a flower arranging class, or read a book about it that you think I’d enjoy? If so, please share information in the comments. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying my hand at this each month and teaching myself what looks right. We’ll see how much I improve over the coming year.
Happy New Year!
PS: Heavens, I forgot to write down which plants I used for this arrangement. That’s kind of the point of this post, isn’t it???? The red berries are Chinese Pistache (tree). The purple spikes are Salvia leucantha. The white flowers are, of course, narcissus. The red flower is Abutilon. There is one fennel stalk with umbel, and the leafy spike at the back is native California huckleberry, Vaccinium ovatum. There is also some manzanita on the far right.