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.

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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