In a Vase on Monday: Abundance Abounds

It gave me great pleasure to take advantage of the best the garden has to offer in late summer and pick blooms for today’s vase, and with hints of the change in season decided to keep roughly within an autumnal colour palette.

Nearly all of the blooms were picked from the cutting beds: that prolific but unknown single dahlia and Dahlias ‘Karma Naomi’ and a red  ‘Bishop’s Children seedling, a yellow annual dahlia from ‘Dandy Mixed’, sunflowers ‘Italian White’ and ‘Earth Walker’, Rudbeckias ‘Irish Eyes’ and ‘Cherry Brandy’. They were joined by a dahlia from one of the bold borders which has produced nobbut a in the last couple of years and which from its colour I think must be ‘Happy Halloween’, Alstroemeria ‘Callisto’, Crocosmia ‘Canary Bird’, Persicarias ‘Red Dragon’ and ‘Fat Domino’, a few calendula and a handful of spent heuchera stems. A broken stem of Sedum ‘Thunderhead’ supports the redder shades of ‘Naomi’, ‘Fat Domino’, the heuchera stems and the pink streaks on the alstroemeria blooms.

The stoutness of the majority of blooms equated to a stubbornness and refusal to stand up in the chunky rectangular vase; adding pebbles helped, but then it became too hard to push the stems through the pebbles. In the end I removed all the blooms, tied them into a posy and placed them in vase before adding the pebbles and snipping the twine that held the blooms, allowing the stems to relax again. Along with the cooking apple, damsons and tomatoes (Sweet Aperitif) this vase well and truly sums up the abundance of the late summer garden.

During the week, I was able to take advantage of less sutumnally-shaded blooms to create three other posies – one based on yellow rose The Poet’s Wife’ to welcome Elder Daughter and The Poppet who were coming to stay for a couple of days, one with Aster  ‘Milady’, Antirrhinum ‘Admiral’s Purple’ and the foliage of Lavender ‘Spanish Eyes’ as a thank you for a friend giving me a lift and the third, a replacement for Monday’s lilies, with a bog-standard unnamed hydrangea, Sedum ‘Stewed Rhubarb Mountain’, spent stems of Verbena hastata and spent heads of sunflower and inula. I would happily have made several more, given half the chance!

Like many of us participating in this IAVOM meme, creating at least one vase a week has brought such a frissson of excitement into my life, and no sooner has Monday’s creation seen the light of day then I begin looking forward to the next one. Equally exciting  is to see what others have popped into their vases, so if you want to join in and show us what you have been able to cut from your garden or forage nearby to pop into a vase or other container, then include links to and from this post when you add the vase to your own blog so we can share in the pleasure your vase brings you.