A fresh take on foliage for the New Year
January 6, 2024. An auspicious date that finds me yearning for the hope and comfort that the garden often provides. A temperature high of 44-degrees actually felt warmer, thanks to the weak winter sunshine (almost horizontal) seeping over the fence in the southwest corner of my backyard.
“I’m heading out to the greenhouse,” I told Bruce. He was nobly exercising on the stationary bicycle, but of course, I always count gardening as “exercise” when my doctor asks me how active I am. The greenhouse has a small heater and fan, so the warm, breezy interior lifted my mood. I decided to make an arrangement with what I could clip from the cutting garden and greenhouse, and here is what I made.
The vessel is a footed compote, circa early 20th century, according to my mother. It was her grandmother’s; my great-grandmother Flaura Winslow’s. A cut glass piece, it has been handed down through the matriarchy, and now resides on a shelf in our library. I had never used it for floral arranging, but a domed metal flower frog fit nicely inside, making it possible for me to create this lush greenery piece even though the bowl is 4-inches deep.
The ingredients from the greenhouse include three types of scented and variegated fancy-leaf pelargoniums (varieties long forgotten because I overwinter them each year for replanting in my patio containers come summer).
Ingredients from the garden include the variegated red-stemmed leucothoe and a few early stems of cerinthe that had self-seeded in the gravel path. I stuck a little bit cut from the glossy green Pieris japonica toward the back, just to prop up some of the tender pelargonium cuttings.
All this fresh, new growth, in such a vivid array of lemon yellow, blue-green, deep maroon, and creamy white varigation, worked its magic on my spirit today. To think this vessel is more than a century old, and that I can celebrate my female elders with my pretty display of greenery, it’s promising.
