THE BEAUTY OF WEEDS

This morning we had a walk around the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne before breakfast, a lovely way to start the day.

I actually took this photo on a morning in mid-December, in part of the Ornamental Lake called the Long Island Backwater. This area in recent years has been landscaped with plants indigenous to the area prior to European settlement. The Ornamental Lake has been created in what was originally part of the Yarra River, which is now about 100 metres to the north.

In the Herbaceous border I noticed that the Golden Rod, Solidago, is flowering. My Canadian friends insist it is a weed; but here it is carefully tended to play its part in a colourful display.

Here Laurie is admiring the full extent of the Boarder.

A low hanging Magnolia Grandiflora, that must have opened yesterday, was just waiting to be photographed.

Elsewhere my attention was caught by this brilliant red sedum- like flower. I later discovered that its sedum-like appearance is because it is from the same family. It is from South Africa and has the rather prosaic, common name, of 'Airplane plant'; botanically it is known as Crassula perfoliata.  

The red is so vibrant it seems to glow from inside.

This afternoon I caught up with a senior member of the Victorian Branch of the Sogetsu School, my ikebana friend and mentor Kath, who had made this arrangement. I showed her the photos below of my ikebana for this week, and was pleased to get her approval. Kath is a young 93, who continues to make ikebana each week.

In the creek near our house at Torquay I had noticed this bright red patch of Dock, Rumex, that I thought would be interesting in my ikebana this week. I had also visited a friend with a very large Strelitzia reginae, from which I was permitted to cut a few leaves.

I decided to combine these two plants in a modern style, vertical arrangement, because the red colouring in the central rib of the new Strelitzia leaves was very close to the red of the Dock. I also borrowed an idea from Val, the owner of the Strelitzia plant, and 'fenestrated' the leaves to change the original appearance of the material. In this photo it is not so obvious that I have placed the smaller stem of Dock partially behind the Strelitzia leaf so that it can be seen through the fenestrations.

Here is a link to an article about teaching ikebana in Australia that I was asked to write. It was published in the Journal of the International Society of Ikebana Studies.

Greetings from Christopher

31st January 2021

BELL-SHAPED FLOWERS

The last couple of weeks have been relatively cool and cloudy on the Surf coast. Yesterday was perfect summer weather with blue skies and a slight cooling breeze.

This is a view of Southside beach from near the cliff edge that people paragliding use as a launching place. Any breeze coming off the sea will result in an updraft above the cliff. The day, being so fine, was perfect for a walk in the Iron Bark Basin part of the Great Otway National Park.

One of the first wildflowers I noticed was this little Fringed Lily, Thysanotus tuberosus. The small, intense purple flowers, less than 3cm across, have three petals that have the most amazing fringing on their edges.

A little further along we came across a number of small bushes, of what I thought was a white everlasting flower.

Here is one of the larger bushes...

...and a close up of the flowers.

When I zoomed in on the flowers I was really surprised to notice that the flower centres seem to be made up of a cluster of tiny flowers. My friend and excellent plant identifier, Fermi, said that this looks like a member of the Asteraceae family and is most likely a Tansy. The closest I can find on Wikipedia is Achillea ptarmica. 

I have seen this plant in the past and naively assumed it to be indigenous because its petals are papery like an everlasting. However, it may have been introduced as long ago as the 1920s when this whole valley was denuded of its trees. An Ochre mine was established when deposits of Ferris Oxide were identified. It is astonishing to me that the valley was revegetated by the late 1960's when I first began visiting. The following link is to an article about the failed mining project, Jarosite Mine.

It was also a delight to see this Correa with its yellow tipped red bell-shaped flower. Correas are one of our favourite indigenous plants that we have introduced to our garden.

*          *          *          *          *

Meanwhile in our garden the bell-shaped flowers on this succulent have started to open and show their glowing orange interior. The leaves have a silvery-grey 'glaucous' bloom that protects the plant from loosing moisture in the hot sun. 

This week's ikebana uses this succulent, although I removed its large thick leaves. 

Two stems have been arranged at an angle toward the left front. The angle of the shorter stem has been set so that both are a similar height above the vase. I have used the fine leaves of Cootamundra Wattle, Acacia baileyana, for its blue-grey as a textural contrast. Both plants harmonise with the pale blue glaze of the vase by the Victorian ceramic artist Barry Singleton.

Greetings from Christopher

24th January 2021

HYDRANGEA and DRIFTWOOD

 

The La Niña weather pattern brings relatively cooler and wetter summers to Australia. In our case on the southwest coast of Victoria the weather has felt a little like winter, with the temperature down to 11 Celsius last night at 10.00 pm. It may have been slightly cooler overnight.

This was how the beach looked on Saturday evening at 5.30pm, with a fairly strong, cool south wind coming off the sea. It was only when I came home and uploaded the photo that I saw the lone surfer near the middle of the left edge of the image.

The prevailing west and south-westerly winds cause many  of the plants that grow on the cliffs to hug close to the ground. This results in writhing trunks and branches like the Moonah, Melaleuca lanceolata, in this photo.

Back at the house some of our avian summertime visitors are the Sulphur-crested cockatoos. I noticed this pair eating the berries on the Shiny Leaf, Coprosma repens, bush in our neighbour's garden.

*          *          *          *          *

I was looking at my colleague Emily Karanikolopoulos' recent blog posting where she commented on an arrangement she had done, having a number of "incarnations". She observed: "...that this often happens when we make an arrangement and, when we walk past it we see faults and make changes...". Her statement made me smile as I had just done exactly that myself. 

Last week I posted this photo in which I had used a single orange Canna flower as a contrast to the blue of the Agapanthus.

During the week I passed a large mass of Crocosmia, and realised that the intensity of its colour and loose mass would work better in the ikebana. It also had the virtue of adding the lines of the leaves. With them I was able to create a radiating fan moving up toward the flowers.

In the garden the pale pink Hydrangea has produced a number of quite large, heavy flower heads that have collapsed almost to the ground; which I have now propped up. The flower heads start out pale green, become white, then pink. If they survive through to the autumn they go a deeper green, with red on the upper surfaces that are exposed to the cold air. 

I thought these blooms would be best offset by black and so chose this large vessel by the ceramic artist Petrus Spronk. This is his signature style of unglazed black-ware that has been burnished when the clay is in its leather-hard stage so that the resulting surface has a soft glossy finish. The large size of the flower heads make the bowl look smaller. In fact, it  is 29cm in diameter.

In this second version I added a beautifully curving branch of Moonah to give a textural contrast. These two photos were taken by Róża Marciniak.

If you missed the on-line demonstration by my colleague Emily Karanikolopoulos that I mentioned in last week's posting, it can be seen on YouTube. You will need to search for: "Emily Karanikolopoulos ikebana demonstration". I believe it is also on Instagram.

Greetings from Christopher

17th January 2021

AGAPANTHUS and a CANNA FLOWER

More typical summer weather has returned to the South West Coast of Victoria in the last week.

This photo was taken yesterday, Saturday morning, on Jan Juc beach at high tide. A lovely walk before breakfast.

Later in the day we went for a walk in the Iron Bark Basin nature reserve, part of the Great Otway National Park. There, we were delighted to see a large echidna fossicking for ants among rotting fallen branches.

 

Also, we saw this Rosy Hyacinth Orchid, Dipodium roseum. This is a beautiful, relatively tall ground orchid flowering at this time of year. It is much more robust looking than many of the local ground orchids and its appearance is more like that which we expect of orchids.

Meanwhile, with my ikebana eyes watching the world around me, I have been very aware of the large number of blue flowering Agapanthus in the gardens of our neighbourhood. This particular clump is growing in the 'nature strip' of a friend of ours. ('nature strip', noun, Australian English: a piece of publicly owned land between the boundary of a house or other building and the street, typically planted with grass. Definition from Oxford Languages.)  The blue in these flowers was a little deeper than those in the garden proper. I had been thinking of arranging some, and the decision was crystallised when I noticed an intense orange flower had appeared on the Canna Lily that I included in the post of 13th December.

Orange, being on the opposite side of the colour wheel, makes the strongest contrast to blue. So the contrast gives the blue an extra 'zing'. I have also created this ikebana in a dark blue suiban. In the process of making this ikebana I removed almost all of the open flowers because the unopened buds are a much darker blue than the inner aspect of the petals. It also reduced the size of the flower heads, which worked better as I was wanting to emphasise the vertical movement of the the stems.

Finally, you may be interested in an on-line demonstration being given by my colleague Emily Karanikolopoulos for the Mumbai Chapter of Ikebana International. Here are the details: Friday 15th January 2021 at 5:30pm (AEDT). The time is Australian Eastern Daylight-saving Time.

Live streamed on facebook at: www.facebook.com/ikebanainternationalmumbaichapter

Or by Zoom at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87386575321

Meeting ID: 873 8657 6321

Greetings from Christopher

9.00 pm

10th January 2021

KABU WAKE

This week I visited the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne in the early morning, where I was delighted to see a large number of Sacred Lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, flowers blooming at the edge of the lake.

They really are a beautiful plant and make a wonderful display at this time of year. 

The first time I saw Lotus growing wild was in the Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory where it occurs naturally.

In this photo of a fully open flower, the large greenish-yellow seed pod can be seen. As a green or dried material, the seed pod can make an interesting ikebana material as the stem often has interesting curves.

While in Melbourne I also visited the National Gallery of Victoria, which currently has a huge contemporary exhibition, the NGV Triennial 2020. I took the photo above while standing inside an installation created by Kengo Kuma and Geoff Nees, who used recovered timber from the Botanic Gardens to make a semi-circular wooden pavilion. My attention was particularly caught by the pattern of intersecting shafts of light on the floor. Here is a link to the NGV Triennial website, which has a video interview with Kengo Kuma. It is certainly worth a visit to the Gallery if you are in Melbourne between now and the 18th of April.

Meanwhile, the garden at Torquay is looking quite lush with the recent (and current) rain stimulating summer growth. One of the long-flowering exotic plants in the garden is Scabiosa atropurpurea which, being from the Mediterranean, copes well with our conditions.

Here it is, going a little wild in its first flowering.

I love this rich, deep colour. However, occasionally it produces a pale pink and even white bloom.

I have been wanting to use it in an ikebana with Verbena bonariensis, as they both have long, fine stems. They also have a symmetrical growth habit, producing branching stems of equal length on opposite sides of each growth node. 

I made this upright "kabu wake" (seperate groups) ikebana in a deep, cylindrical ceramic vessel. I wanted the space between the groups to allow each element to be seen clearly and their growth habit to unite them. In the process of creation I realised that the symmetrical growth habit of these plants disrupted the vertical form of the ikebana. I found it interesting that to achieve the desired form it was necessary to remove one side branch at each of the nodes on several stems of the Scabiosa. I have placed the Verbena stems so that the side branches project to the front or the rear emphasising the verticality of their growth. It is a paradox in ikebana that it is necessary to remove elements of a plant to reveal its character.

Greetings from Christopher

3rd January 2021