March Arrangement

I knew I wanted to feature Geum coccineum ‘Totally Tangerine’ in this month’s bouquet, because it is a star in the home garden. This year, it started blooming in early February, and as long as I deadhead and give it a little extra compost, it’ll keep flowering until the first frost. It’s simply unstoppable. As you can see, even the spent flowers are attractive, and the foliage forms a nice tidy clump (prune back old leaves for best looks). It is reliably perennial in Zones 4-10, doesn’t mind being a little crowded, and creates multi-flowered, extremely long stems which are perfect for arranging.

Along with the Geum, I used a little Borago officianalis, which really never stopped blooming all through winter here in Zone 9b. Well, maybe December was iffy, but really, it just keeps on truckin’. It reseeds quite vigorously but is easy to remove if you find it thuggish, and the bees really adore it.

For a little greenery, I added some overwintering cilantro which seeded itself in my garlic and shallot beds and grew over the cold season. It’s just now starting to look like it might bolt, so I didn’t feel so bad sacrificing these tall stalks.

We have a new favorite way to eat beets. I pick them when young, peel and chop them in quarters, and roast them in the oven with olive oil and salt. While they are roasting, I make a glaze of equal parts butter, maple syrup, and balsamic vinegar, and cook on low heat until glossy and reduced. Then I pop the roasted beets in the pan with the glaze and serve. Delicious.

We’ve eaten all the broccoli and cauliflower, and have started in on cabbages. Carrots and sugar snap peas are being picked and snacked on daily, and of course we continue to eat the greens. We’re in the process of trying to germinate lettuce without the birds or slugs getting to it - some row cover, tightly pegged to the earth, might be the ticket. Tomatoes have been seeded in trays, and squashes started in the greenhouse.

Our new chickens have begun to lay! Above is a picture of a ‘normal’ egg next to a pullet egg. The pullet eggs are about half the size of the normal eggs. The young chickens lay these for a couple of weeks, allowing the vent to stretch, then the eggs become a more normal size. We’re looking forward to having enough extra eggs soon so we can make chocolate pudding!

February Arrangement

When I went out today to pick this arrangement, I noticed many flowering plants that were severely damaged by our recent frosts. The Brussels sprouts, which I staked recently, are halfway uncovered and this morning had the finest ice crystals decorating them. The winter veg doesn’t mind the cold, but the flowers are another matter. Luckily, there are some great flowers blooming despite the cold.

For this bouquet, I chose a Hellebore as the main stem, and built the rest of the arrangement around it. Hellebores are stars of the late winter garden. This white one is a cultivar called “Wedding Ruffles;” I bought it two years ago and planted it in a pot. Last summer I replanted it into the garden. It’s the only one to survive this (I replanted four different kinds), and I think because it is in very deep shade and is well-watered. However, that makes it very well hidden and it’s nice to cut the blooms and bring them inside to enjoy them. I wish I could afford a lot of hellebores in all different colors! I love them.

The tiny daffodils are a reliable variety called “Tete a Tete.” They are only about six inches high and they are the earliest to bloom in my garden - the big guys will come later. I also have included some white narcissus, some yellow narcissus, a couple of purple spikes of Salvia leucantha (which I also included in the January arrangement; that tells you how well the do all winter long) , and some snap pea tendrils and flowers. Oh, and some rosemary, which is blooming now, surprisingly.

Altogether, I think this looks like a little handful of early spring.

January Arrangement

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.