FRUITING BRANCHES AND PAPER

A couple of weeks ago I had a walk in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne on a rather overcast day after it had been raining. The diffused light seemed to make the autumn colours more luminous, perhaps because the wet green leaves were darker looking.

This view is from a high vantage point that looks down to the main lake through some large deciduous trees.

Nearby, this richly coloured tree was like a beacon between the deep greens on either side. 

Along one of the paths I noticed that leaves, like this one, looked extra bright because the area around the veins remained yellow while the edge of the leaves had turned red.

There are only a few native Australian trees that are deciduous, most of which are tropical or subtropical. Apparently we have only one 'true temperate deciduous tree' the Tasmanian Beech Northofagus gunnii. This next link is fascinating and answered my question "How many native deciduous trees are there in Australia?". 

In the gardens I was delighted to see that this Firewheel Tree, Stenocarpus Sinatus, has come into flower. The bright red of the rather extraordinary flowers is really eye catching against the glossy dark green leaves.

The flowers had formed in fairly large clusters scattered over the tree.

This close-up makes sense of the common name, Fire Wheel.

Finally, my ramble took me down to the lake at the lowest part of the garden. I was delighted by this view of a small tree in autumnal splendour reflected on the lake surface. 

In a recent class with my teacher, Elizabeth, we were asked to make an ikebana using fruiting branches and incorporating paper. An interesting challenge. The important thing to keep in mind is that both the botanical and man-made elements must be integrated in the design and be necessary. That means there should be a sense of connectedness between the elements. Secondly, if either of the materials were removed the ikebana would look incomplete.

This is Elizabeth's demonstration example of the exercise. She had hand cut strips of magazine pages to create two masses of looping lines, then added a mass of green and orange cumquats. 

For my ikebana I collected three branches of figs that I had seen growing wild by the Yarra River in Melbourne and set them in a tall conical metal vessel. The fruit were very small, probably because of the poor quality of the soil. I removed almost all of the leaves. The remaining ones are mostly showing their undersides, which are interestingly textured and have pronounced veins. Then I rolled two sheets of red tissue paper around a bamboo skewer, creating two straight straw-like red lines.

The following morning the leaves had wilted badly, so I removed them. The result looked better to my eyes, being a less fussy design. One of the paper straws had softened at the bend, but I decided not to fiddle with it and risk making the bend even weaker.

Greetings from Christopher

15th May 2021