As November slides into December, we lose light and colour fades from
our gardens. Bright, autumnal orange can take a stand against this! A few days
ago I ran my first workshop on high impact flowers – flowers that really stand
out and make you take notice of them. I chose contrasting colours – they sit
opposite each other on the colour wheel – orange and blue-violet. We made a
front-facing arrangement and helped it to stay upright using natural river
stones. Here is one of the arrangements packed up and ready to go. As you can
see we tied it with natural string
Here is my arrangement standing by a light. The orange came from the
roses and the (single) leucospermum. The blue-violet came from lisyanthus and
veronica. There is contrasting green with Anastasia chrysanthemum and foliage
(ruscus, eucalyptus and aspidistra) and also foliage with an orange tint (leucadendron
safari sunset – wonderful name!). This arrangement certainly had impact and and
the workshop participants enjoyed learning a new method of hand-tying.
I have also recently run a woodland log workshop. This workshop offers a
real chance for participants to get creative! I offered all sorts of materials
to use – including plant material in different colours and white, interesting
foliage, succulents, dried seedheads, cones and bark. Here is a taste of it:
In the event, everyone chose to use only white and green. Very classy. Here are some examples – can you guess how we
made fresh flowers appear to ‘grow’ out of the logs? This first one is a long,
meandering log. It excites your eye as it travels along the log to meet a
little robin sitting on a branch:
This is a fatter log with great texture and lovely use of succulents.
This one is beautifully proportioned with gorgeous green and white
contrasts.
I bucked the trend and added orange to my log – I`m on an orange roll at
the moment!
This weekend I put together some simple table centres for Sickleholme
Golf Club. Just a rose, some lisyanthus, a stem of ruscus sprayed gold, a wired
pine cone, a stem of hypericum berries, a sprig of holly and a couple of green
chrysanthemum heads. Simple, quick and effective. This is the start of the
Christmas flower season….on from orange…. and into red, gold, green and white!
