Posts tagged black eyed susans

Floral Fantasy: White

Who doesn’t love white? Especially in flowers. Always elegant and classic, it is certainly the most requested colour scheme not only for weddings, but also for most design work. And throw in some chartreuse, yummy! I would always advise customers at the flower shop when they were not sure of a colour for a gift arrangment, to go white.

As a neutral, it is suitable for any home, and people have much stronger opinions about colour, white is certainly a safe choice. My friend happens to love white and green, smart woman, so when I was visiting her in Toronto, it was off to pick up some white and green flowers to prepare an arrangement for her coffee table.

I have already showed you the hydrangea arrangement we made for her front hall, and we had some extra Limelights left and more hostas, so we lined this vase as well.  I love lining vases, when I worked at Kenneth Turner, all our clear vases were lined, we used to use a flower frog made out of chicken wire to hold the flowers in place. But when I worked at Black Eyed Susan’s, we taped a grid on the vase after lining it, much easier on the hands.

Grouping flowers is the big trend in the floral design world now, so I added my hydrangea in two groups of two. When you are grouping larger flowers it is not as important to add them in odd numbers, however I would never put just two roses together, so they were added in groups of 5 and 7. 

Commercial chrysanthemums and alstromeria completed the  white flowers, while green hypericum berries brought in a fresh shot of green.

And that green Wasabi coleus, talk about yummy, I loved it, and it was cut fresh from the garden. Perhaps a bit too fresh perhaps.

The next morning we found small puddles of water on the surface of the tray and could not figure out where they came from. Imagine our surprise, when we discovered new ones later that day. How was this happening?

Looking a bit more closely at the arrangement we discovered this.

I have been a floral designer for over twenty years, and had never seen this before. Has it happened to you?

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Free Plants Are Great, Part 4

When I was at Kilbourne Grove a couple of weeks ago, I took these pictures, that is why the Black Eyed Susans are not yet in flower.

As I have mentioned in previous posts here, here and here,  I am lucky enough to receive the “unsalables” at the flower shop where I work. Sometimes they are not my favourite flower or colour, but I take them anyway.  My garden, when we moved in, was a “tabula rasa”, or blank slate. So I have a lot of ground to fill.

I placed these plants at the front of the house. There is a few large rocks sticking out of the soil and a blue spruce had been planted in the middle (not my favourite, I am still deciding if I should keep it or rip it out).  Around this I have planted:

 

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Sedum “Autumn Joy”,  zebra grass or Miscanthus sinensis ‘Zebrinus’   and the blackeyed susan,  Rudbeckia fulgida  ‘Goldstrum’.

Just before this picture was taken, the last of the yellow lilys (also from work) finished flowering.  That is all that is in this bed, except for a few yellow tulips that my Mum first brought me when we moved in.

 

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Do you like the special effect on the picture?  It was really easy, pick a rainy day and stand inside and take it from your window.

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