Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Flower Arranging Workshop with the Tohickon Garden Club
I'm not much in the way of flower arranging, being more of the "stuff things in a container and hope it doesn't fall over" school of design, Today's meeting of the Tohickon Garden Club was a make and take. The club would provide a bunch of flowers, some greens, hypericum berries, and oasis floral foam to each member who attended the meeting. In turn, they were asked to bring a container with an approximately 6 inch diameter opening. It could be a vase, a basket with a plastic liner, a small pumpkin with the top removed, cleaned out, and a plastic cup set inside. As well, it was suggested that we could bring embellishments in the way of pods, cones, seeds, foliage, or whatever took our fancy.
Excellently skilled at arranging flowers and an accredited flower show judge, Sue bought the flowers,
greenery and stems of hypericum berries, then divided things up into equivalent bunches. Rust, yellow,
green chrysanthemums, purple statice, fern fronds, huckleberry leaves. A bunch of wheat, if you wanted
some. As I left for the meeting I had detoured into BelleWood Garden's woods and clipped some white
variegated pachysandra and a few leaves of silver veined Arum italicum 'Pictum'. To hold everything
I brought the cache pot cum vase that I'd bought the day before at the New York Botanical Garden.
Many hands at work. Interestingly, while everyone had more or less the same material with which to work
the different containers and, emore importantly, different tastes, meant no two arrangements looked the same.
A charming country style basket arrangement in cheerful autumn colors.
A taller, yet also well balanced arrangement in a glass vase.
A wonderful tabletop arrangement enhanced with some sweet gum leaves and mini cattails.
A pair of little pumpkins (I think they're artificial) that will be perfect on a Thanksgiving table.
Here is mine. I traded yellow and rust chrysanthemums for additional
green ones. Purple statice and some green-eyed yellow chrysanthemums
as accents. I'm pleased at how well the variegated pachysandra and
arum leaves turned out. Love my container too. And as I anticipated,
Sue said, "What do you mean you can't arrange flowers! Next year
you can enter the flower show." Oh well. I do like my arrangement.
So perhaps, just perhaps, I might just enter the flower show. We'll see.