FRESH AND DRIED MATERIALS

This afternoon I had walk in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne...

...and was greeted by this planting of cosmos in the rose garden bed. 

I had gone into the Gardens as I was curious to see what colour the flowers on a huge bromeliad were. I had noticed its flower spike developing a few weeks ago.

  

            

To my surprise, they were white. The flowers of many of the smaller species of bromeliads are highly colourful and often strange looking. None-the-less, this large variety is beautiful and spectacular for its size. The flower spike was a good 2 metres tall. This seems to be an Alcantarea species in the Bromeliad family.

The afternoon was perfect and I was not the only one enjoying the surrounds of the Gardens.

Meanwhile, back in Torquay, each day as I walk into the entrance of our house I pass a bunch of dried Honesty seed pods, Lunaria annua. I had gathered the seeds from my niece’s garden, which is in a much wetter part of Victoria than Torquay. To succeed, I had to grow them in a pot with a good water reservoir. 

I remember in my childhood being delighted by the septums of these seed pods which are translucent discs with a silvery sheen, as shown in this detail above from an earlier arrangement. They were a popular item in the dried arrangements of the 1960s.

What I have enjoyed in seeing them every day is the texture and colour of the seed pod covering. It is a purply-mauve with a rather parchment like texture. Because the dried material is so stiff I have avoided arranging it. However, I thought the colour was beginning to fade and decided to use it before I missed the opportunity. 

My intention was that the focus of my arrangement would be texture as much as colour. This brought to mind the velvety brown heads of the bullrushes in the creek. I gathered some that are fairly thin and which had an unusual curve. 

Because of the relatively deep colours of the materials I decided to use a tall black nageire vessel with two side openings. This enabled me to seperate the ikebana into two distinct but complementary sides. One being for massed dried materials and the other fresh materials with a linear form. An arrangement using both Fresh and Dried Materials is a Sogetsu School curriculum exercise. I have added two long green leaves for their fresh appearance on the right and two artichoke heads on the left side for their colour and mass. One of the artichokes is obscured in this photograph.

Greetings from Christopher

10th February 2019