CURVES and SPACE

  

This morning was bright, sunny and windless. As I was preparing breakfast, I became aware of a very noisy chattering of a small flock of birds and went to investigate.

Sure enough some Rainbow Lorikeets were having a lovely time feeding on the nectar in the flowers of the Angophora costata that I mentioned in last week's posting. Most of the blossom is in a large mass on the crown of the tree and is not noticeable from ground level in the garden. Below are a couple of photos I took of some small clusters of blossom.

   

This second one was conveniently caught in the early morning sun. As I took the second photo... 

...I noticed this Australian magpie sitting silently while basking in the sunlight.

In the week before Christmas we had one day of 41.5 Celsius which somewhat ravaged this pale pink Hydrangea. I am thinking of removing the damaged flowers in the hope that it will promote some new flowers.  

The two pots of richer pink and the pale blue/mauve Hydrangeas did not suffer so badly in the heat as their flowers were not so developed. 

I am looking forward to an opportunity to use them in some ikebana before too long, because in February and March we usually have more consistently hot weather which could damage them.

In the meantime, I raided our neighbour's garden (with permission) for some South African Agapanthus which now are at their peak. One of the flowers had a beautiful natural curve and a smaller secondary flower on the curve of the stem.

Using an unusual contemporary-style Japanese ikebana vase, I set two stems of the Agapanthus at a slight angle to emphasise the graceful curve. The lowest flower is actually a second stem with a small flower that had just shed its calyx and placed in-line with the larger flower. I have added a contrasting mass of Bursaria, from our garden, behind the main stem. 

The Bursaria was a little past its prime and soon started to drop tiny white petals all over the shelf.

So five days later I slightly re-worked the ikebana after removing the Bursaria. This time I have increased the lean to the left, further emphasising the curve in the stem, and separated the two stems. I was really pleased by the narrow space created by the two parallel stems and find this version more satisfying than the first. 

Greetings from Christopher

25th January 2020

WIND BLOWN DETRITUS IN THE GARDEN

A couple of weeks ago, as I was doing some garden watering in the evening, my attention was caught by the remarkably beautiful colours in the bark of the Angophora costata.

The colours of rose-pink and blue-grey looked luminous in the early evening light. This is like the colour change of autumn leaves. The bark is a more rusty red for most of the year. 

However, as it is summer, the bark has started to peel away showing a much lighter colour underneath.

When Europeans first came to this country they thought it strange that the trees kept their leaves throughout the year, but that the outer bark was shed from trees.

Another particularly unusual characteristic of  A. costata is the twisting habit of the branches. The branch, above, hangs quite low and then bends sideways and back again on itself. I think it is crying out for a large ikebana installation opportunity. In the meantime, and perhaps for ever, it adorns our garden.

Above are the flowers that have opened on our tree in the last few weeks. They are sweetly fragrant, attractive to bees and other insects, and look very like many eucalyptus flowers. However, my reading has taught me that Angophora is a genus of six species and differentiated, by its flowers, from Eucalyptus. 

A fact that I had never noticed before is that these flowers do not have a 'cap', the modified petal (and or sepals) that form the covering of the unopened flower in the Eucalyptus and Corymbia genera.

This close-up shows a cap, or operculum, just about to fall from the small Corymbia flower-bud on the right.

We have had some quite strong winds lately and some large pieces of the Angophora bark have been blown about the garden.  

I was rather surprised to see one piece of the bark, where it had split, was caught on the rather pointy stems of the Strelitzia juncea.  

No human intervention was needed for this floating garden sculpture. However, it proved an inspiration for my ikebana. As I had pruned the spent Strelitzia flowers and some stems overhanging the path just the day before I had the perfect materials for my experiment. 

I placed the stems into two kenzans and zigzagged them so that they intersected where I could pin them. I have deliberately reversed one piece of bark showing its lighter underside and placed it behind the darker coloured piece. One of the very long stems had a soft 'S' curve so I used it as it was, as a contrasting line.

The shino-glazed bowl is by the New Zealand ceramic artist Elena Renka.

Greetings from Christopher
19th January 2020

SUMMER WIND STORMS and SUMMER FLOWERS

    

Earlier in the year Laurie and I were walking in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne when we saw this Black Swan with three cygnets feeding on one of the weed covered lakes. Laurie took the photo, which he subsequently described as his 'ikebana photo' because of the framing of the image by the horizontal branch.

In late December, a cold front with particularly strong winds and gusts exceeding 100 kilometres per hour came through Melbourne. Unfortunately, one of the large oaks was shattered in the storm. This particular tree was over 130 years old. I have been told that these northern hemisphere trees grow much  faster in Victoria's relatively warmer climate and that such trees age more quickly.

The White Oak, Quercus alba, is native to eastern and central North America and was the only example in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.

The Gardens must have a good monitoring system because a protective fence had been erected around it some weeks before the tree was shattered. I think potential splitting of large branches from the main trunk had been observed.
    

This photo is a sad scene of destruction and 130 years is a long time to wait for recovery, if such a thing is possible.

On a lighter note, back at Torquay so far this summer season w have been spared damaging winds. We have had only two isolated days with desiccating winds and the temperature in the mid 40s Celsius. 

Surprisingly, these naturalised Sweet Scabious, Scabiosa atropurpurea, seem to be very tolerant of our hot dry weather. 

Though they do prefer moisture being retained in the soil from our extensive mulching.

  
I love the natural variety of colours in this particular species. There is one small plant in the garden which has white flowers. Because these plants used to grow wild in the nature-strips of Torquay when I was in primary school here, I thought they were a native species, not introduced, as they have been, from the Mediterranean region.

Also flowering at this time of year is the indigenous Bursaria spinosa. There are several of these small trees in the garden and the mass of their small white flowers make a good ikebana subject.

Here are the two plants from different hemispheres making an informal summer ikebana in a quirky ceramic vessel that I bought in Mashiko in Tochigi Prefecture.

Greetings from Christopher
12th January 2020

2019 FINAL CLASSES

Early summer in Victoria is the time for spectacular flowering on three trees in particular that I always enjoy seeing.

This Jacaranda mimosifolia, from subtropical South America, is growing in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne in front of the original Director's residence within the gardens. Always a beautiful sight.

Among the native Australian flowering trees, the Brachychiton acerifolius would have to be one of the most spectacular. The intense red of the flowers is exaggerated because the flower stems are also the same colour and the same slightly fleshy quality. 

As you can see in this photo, if it loses all its leaves at flowering, the sight is extraordinary. I have been nursing along one of these beauties in our garden. However, away from its natural home on the mid-eastern coast of Australia, it struggles from our poor soil quality and low summer rainfall. This one is growing in the well-watered parkland that surrounds the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.

The third flowering tree in this group is the Grevillea robusta, this one also in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. 

In this case my attention was drawn to the tall tree because of the yellow-gold stamens littering the footpath.
  

For a close up I photographed this lower growing branch near the lakeside restaurant...

...and in our own garden the somewhat smaller tree has more flowers than ever this year.

To ikebana. The following are the last photos I have from 2019 classes .

In Geelong, Maree used Amaranthus caudatus for her principal line in this cascading ikebana.

Maureen teamed lichen encrusted Boxthorn with the orangey-red flower of the New South Wales Christmas Bush Ceratopetalum gummiferum. Her exercise was to make an ikebana arrangement 'that incorporated the area around the vessel'.

Ellie's exercise was to make an arrangement/installation 'for a particular place in the classroom'. She chose to work in front of a panel heater with vertical indentations. To emphasise the lines, Ellie arranged straight stemmed Strelitzia flowers. On the upper surface of the heater she arranged two New Zealand Flax leaves and a single Strelitzia flower peeping from behind the leaves.

In my class with Elizabeth, the exercise was to make ikebana in a vessel that was not intended to be used for ikebana.

Pearl used an assemblage of river stones to set some bark, Smoke bush and a pink Grevillea. 

Swan used a ceramic teapot in which she arranged two roses and some Smoke bush leaves.

  

My ikebana was created in a unique hand-crafted wooden box that was given to Laurie and me as a wedding present. I set the close fitting lid of the box at an angle, dividing the box into two triangular compartments, into which I arranged five Dietes grandiflora leaves and three stems of Freesia laxa flowers. The ikebana had a playful, open feel with a sense of swirling movement.

Greetings from Christopher

4th January 2020

   

As I write this on Saturday afternoon in Torquay on the Surfcoast on the west side of Victoria, the cool change has brought down our temperature to 17 Celsius. In Mallacoota and the south coast of New South Wales the bushfires have worsened after the lull that allowed some evacuations by sea to take place yesterday afternoon.