In a Vase in Monday: Dodecahedral

There were no preconceived ideas in my head when I ventured forth on my mission yesterday to cut blooms for Monday’s vase – if anything, I was perhaps expecting a posy of little stems, a mix of the best of the garden’s spring blooms. That was not to be, as I was drawn to a random wallflower, something I have occasionally grown from seed, but not for a few years, so this is certainly a relict. The buds are not open yet, but at the moment they are blood red, a fairly typical wallflower colour and not what I would have voluntarily chosen when sowing them.

Armed with this wallflower I was now looking for longer stemmed blooms to accompany it, and chose partially spent Hellebore ‘Double Ellen White Spotted’ with its faded but deep red spotted petals, or sepals as they really are, and three stems of Narcissus ‘Bridal Crown’, bulbs bought 4 years ago to provide flowers for Younger Daughter’s wedding posy. Already looking elegant together, I decided on this occasion that ‘less is more’ and left my search at that, so was pleased to be able to enhance their elegance with a Caithness Glass vase I had forgotten I had, another of the original 60s art glass range in the ‘peat’ colourway which complemented the wallflower and spotting of the hellebores.

Joining the vase and the blooms is today’s prop, a dodecahedral garnet, a ‘dodecahedron’ being any polyhedron with twelve flat faces. A regular

dodecahedron has twelve regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex, and has 12 faces, 20 vertices, 30 edges, and 160 diagonals (60 face diagonals, 100 space diagonals). Garnet occurs naturally in this form and although irregular, most of the faces are still pentagons. I chose it because the blood red colour reflects similar shades within the vase, but then had to smile when I checked its healing qualities: amongst other things, it is believed to bring courage and creative energy, and assistance in times of chaos, disruption and emotional trauma… Enough said…!

What blooms could you find to help reduce the chaos and disruption that we are all facing at the moment? The regular habit of creating a vase on Monday brings structure into our week, a little bit of normality, so please join us if you can, adding links to and from this post.

ps the wind must have disturbed the arrangement whilst I was photographing it, so here is a belated view showing the wallflower and, sadly, the now-drooping hellebores (I thought they would be ‘spent’ enough to hold up well to being in a vase…)