Hot Orange

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!