In a Vase on Monday: Keeping Watch at Twilight

I had no preconceived ideas of what I might pick for today’s vase but wanted to avoid hellebores and snowdrops, which would have been the easy option. I don’t have many summer snowflakes, Leucojum aestivum, but the first stems were in bud so I cut three as a starting point, keeping the stems long.

Visualising them in a tall slim vase with some simple foliage, I became distracted in the Coop Corner by Nandina domestica ‘Twilight’, recognising that its mottled green and white foliage would make an ideal partner for the leucojum. The nandina, however, is only a small shrub so the ‘tall slim vase’ idea was now a dead duck, but the adjacent Clematis armandi generously offered up its pretty scented blooms and changed the nature of the vase entirely. The latter’s huge leathery leaves would have looked completely out of scale so were snipped off and replaced with a similarly dark green element in the form of aromatic Choisya ternyata ‘White Dazzler’, which seemed to pull the other snippets together – and if the dazzling white blooms choose to open in the vase then that will be a bonus.

A black matte vase was selected to hold the chosen stems, with the leucojum stems cut to about half their original length to match their counterparts. Utilising the twilight moniker of the nandina as a handle to choose an appropriate title, I remembered the frequent reminders given by several of Noelle’s Monday vases, which have been accompanied by small replica figures of the Terracotta Army, and used one from my own version of the same thing – thanks for the prompts, Noelle! If you would like to join Noelle and myself and several others by finding material from your garden or nearby and popping them into some sort of receptacle, then please do so by using the usual links.