In a Vase on Monday: Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo

There seemed to be a number of different flowers that hadn’t made it to a vase yet or were going strong and could do with cutting to prolong their flowering so I have been mentally dithering for a few days over what to include in a vase on Monday. However, bottling out of a decision and producing four separate vases has had the unexpected secondary benefit of uplifting the ‘underwhelmed’ impression of the garden that I wrote about yesterday, reminding me that there is still lots going on, but just not all in the same place!

The range of scale and shades of the available flowers suggested separate vases, and certainly there were no suitable bedfellows for the pink and white Cyclamen hederifolium of the first vase. Like Pauline at Lead Up the Garden Path mine are spreading at a very satisfying rate, and I couldn’t really say when or how many were planted in the first place. They looked so delightful in this green crocus vase that I went out and cut a few more to add to them. As the weather is still debating whether to brighten up or not the vases were taken straight outside and photographed around the stone trough and wall just outside the back door.

I had chosen four green vases to provide continuity, although the two green bottles were not really wide enough at the neck for the proposed content, and not photographing the vases together I realised in retrospect that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway -hey ho! The Tagetes ‘Paprika’, a favourite for the last two years, is late to flower having been re-sown due to the dodgy compost experience and the bushy plants meant that not all the sprigs that were cut could squeeze into the bottle along with the Hemerocallis ‘Mini Stella’ and Inula hookeri. The hemerocallis, a compact and well behaved variety, has also just begun flowering, unlike the inula which has been on the go for weeks.

Cosmos ‘Candy Stripe’ has been a real star  for a number of weeks and next year I must include this in the main herbaceous borders as well as the cutting beds  – the flowers vary slightly in shade and marking and it has been a joy to watch their progress. Collecting seed from them is another ‘must’! Anemone japonica ‘Honorine Jobert’ was an ideal companion although the way the flowers group together on separate stalks towards the end of a stem was not conducive to using them with the shorter individual stems of the cosmos and a wider necked vase would definitely have helped. Several petals were lost between cutting and placing too, but it may be that the flowers were not so much at their peak as I thought.

The ‘Ruby Eclipse’ sunflowers have varied in both the size of their heads and the length of their stems so I have been watching out for suitable cutting contenders – there were two today, so they were snipped and included in the fourth vase along with a trio of hips on the prickly stems of climbing rose ‘Parkdirektor Riggers’:

I couldn’t choose a favourite from the four vases but have to confess that their varied presence brings me such joy as I look at them – four times more joyful than a single vase?! Well, perhaps not, but bringing something in from the garden every week has been a real pleasure, and the unexpected popularity of the meme has demonstrated just how much we can all benefit from doing so. If you would like to join in, just post your pickings with a link to this post, and leave a comment on this post too with a link to yours so we can see what has brought you pleasure in a vase on Monday.