PINK AND GREY

On Saturday a week ago I attended an Ikebana International Melbourne Chapter workshop led by Naomi Nakajima who is the head of the Ichiyo School in Melbourne. The subject she had chosen was to make an ikebana arrangement using vegetables. Naomi presented three examples that included flowers and represented three courses in a meal. They can be seen on the Ikebana International Melbourne, Chapter 29, blog.

I made the ikebana above in which I deliberately used only two colours so that it did not look too busy. The red capsicum becomes a focal point like the "hikae" flower in a basic ikebana arrangement. I was somewhat frustrated because I ran out of time to fix the Dietes leaf on the left side so that it stood up tall and straight. Without being fixed, it just slipped down to the bottom of the vase. As a consequence the work is too short for the height of the vase.

In Victoria and the mid and south east coast of Australia we are having a wet spring with serious flooding in many areas.

This photo shows the creek near our place. It is intermittent and actually runs underground through a pipe in the area seen here.

Looking the opposite direction to the photo above, last Wednesday it looked like this...

 

...and this, just 50 metres to the right of the previous photo. In the years since my childhood I have never seen a flash flood so high and flowing so fast. Fortunately no property damage has been reported.

The flooding made me wonder about the survival of the new planting along the creek...

 

...and the self-sown Tamarisk, Tamarix ramosissima. The Tamarisk is exceptionally tough and I am sure designed to survive flash flooding. I had used some of its flowers in an ikebana I made a few weeks ago.

 

The inspiration for the ikebana came from some branches of a Casuarina on our fence line, the top of which I had to lop.

When I was about to throw the curving branches onto the heap of prunings to be mulched, I noticed masses of small cones. To my eyes this looked like interesting material for a slightly larger ikebana.

Once I had the branches and a vase chosen I needed a focal point of suitable colour. I remembered the pink of the Tamarisk and thought it would complement the grey of the branches. 

When I had the materials in the vase I realised that I needed an additional deeper pink, as the Tamarisk was pale and evenly coloured when seen in a mass. It looked just a little too flat. I picked some of the pink Valerian, Centranthus ruber, from this patch which I have planted especially for use in demonstrating basic exercises in the Sogetsu curriculum. 

This is the finished ikebana. I have inverted the Casuarina branch in a large vase because this position exaggerated the curving lines on the branches. It also allowed the strength of the main branch to show, which worked well in the large vase (38cm tall and 20cm wide). The mass of the pink blossom is largely contained within the curve of the branches and extends to the right side of the work.

The vase is by the Victorian ceramic artist Graeme Wilkie of Qdos Gallery, Lorne.

Greetings from Christopher

23rd October 2022