In a Vase on Monday: Dawn is Breaking

After the excitement of IAVOM’s fifth anniversary last week we are back to ‘normal’ today; it was lovely to see all the ‘not’ vases and great that everyone rose to the challenge in some way or another to celebrate the occasion, showing what an inspirational lot you are. Thank you for humouring my request and for your continued enthusiasm. As promised, the name of everyone (with a UK contact address) who commented last week

was put into a draw, and the Golfer drew Karen (of Bramble Garden)’s name out of the fish dish – a £10 garden gift voucher will be posted out to you, Karen, once you have sent me your postal address.

Instead of an anniversary, today’s vase celebrates the numerous buds that have recently broken out on Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’, growing in the shrub border. Buds have been very sporadic until this year but are so easily ruined by frost so I shall enjoy them while I can. Their distinctive fragrance (vanilla? I am not sure) is not yet evident outside but is certainly discernible inside when not competing with cooking smells in the kitchen. A few stray leaves were removed from the essentially bare stems which lent themselves to an ikebana style arrangement and a new purchase was pressed into service, a blue rectangular receptacle from Chive, simply made from slabs of clay with a rectangular opening hand cut in the upper surface. Knowing how much I liked Chive’s quirky animal vases, Sandra of Wild Daffodil kindly alerted me to their recent sale; however, faced with just TOO much choice of creatures, instead of animal vases I chose a couple of ikebana ones!

Joining the stems of viburnum were two Arum italicum ‘Marmoratum’ leaves, always a joy to see with their glossy dark green leaves and silver veining, and a clematis seedhead, along with broken open beech nut cases from a neighbour’s beech tree, which heavily litter our woodland floor. Interestingly, we rarely get beech seedlings appearing whereas the

hazel nuts similarly purloined by the local squirrel population are regularly forgotten and pop up as new little hazel trees throughout the garden – are beech nuts best eaten fresh, do you think? Do they have a BBE date? Having cut down our last two remaining hazel trees this autumn (the product of previous squirrel activity), the minor problem of hazel afforestation should soon be a thing of the past…

Are there flowers or is their foliage in your garden that you could snip today and pop into a vase (or not) to bring pleasure into your week? We have been learning to look at our gardens in a different way for IAVOM, thinking out of the box to create a vase every week of the year if we can, and last week’s contributions will have given many of us some new ideas. It has proved inspirational to share these contributions, so please leave links to and from this post so we can do so.