Flowers on the Brain

Afflicted with cabin fever, I went on a road trip to see some fabulous botanical images made with a flatbed scanner. That's right, just like the one in your home or office. Flowers, vegetables and other plants and parts of plants in three-dimensional luminous color--they were wonderful! And I'm sharing them with you in this blog post.

Anyone can plunk a handful of flowers into a vase and call it an arrangement, and in the past, this is what I have done. True, I had made some attempt to arrange the flowers attractively, but the results could at best be described as rustic or primitive. I wanted something a little more polished [...]

When I reviewed Debra Prinzing's book Slow Flowers back in July, I wondered about Debra's use of the terms seasonal and sustainable. I wondered particularly about how seasonal and sustainable such flowers would be in climates much colder than Debra's moderate Pacific Northwest. Before I ever published that review, I gave Debra a chance to [...]

It's true. You can neaten your garden and beautify your home at the same time. The peachy gladiolus had fallen face down in the dirt. Once rinsed off, the flower spike was still pretty. I surrounded it with stems of 'Dark Towers' penstemon. The seedheads from this plant are interesting maroon beads, but they are [...]

I decided to go one-for-two: my backyard bouquet for this week is also my Wildflower Wednesday post. Instead of picking plants from my garden, I decided to limit myself to those plants growing wild. Actually, I limited myself to the tall wildflowers. I didn't pick any lobelia or turtlehead or jewelweed.The rosy flower clusters belong [...]

Here's my bouquet of the week, picked on Saturday. For my "something wild" I have daisy fleabane and the inula, which just showed up in the chicken yard, though some people grow it as a garden plant. The "something weird" also counts as "something wild": the chartreuse seed bracts from a tree growing wild in [...]

For this week's backyard bouquet I kept it simple. No more one-of-everything-in-the-garden. I just went with what I had a lot of. The white Incrediball hydrangea is really putting out blossoms, although they are not as big as they have been in the past. Since this shrub was dug up this spring, thrown in the [...]

Flower arranging, I've discovered, is one of those things that can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. Before reading Slow Flowers by Debra Prinzing (read my review), I had read other books and articles on flower arranging in the past, and I always got hung up on the details. [...]

Many gardeners don't cut flowers from their own gardens. I know some feel it will ruin the look or design of their garden to have pieces missing from it, but I think a lot of gardeners just haven't given themselves permission. Or, like me, after they cut the stems they wonder, "Now what?" I have [...]