Last week I showed a close-up of a flower cluster on the Red Flowering Gum Corymbia ficifolia in the garden. The still smallish tree was a wedding present from a neighbour.
This photo shows the whole tree from an elevated position, so it just looks like a large shrub. Many more flowers have opened in the last few days and there are even more flowers that have not yet opened. I wanted to bring this intense colour indoors, so I picked a single inflorescence which had over forty individual flowers .
I set the flowers and a single branchlet in an irregularly shaped, mostly black, vase which has a closely matching red glaze across the mouth. It was made by the Adelaide ceramicist Rebecca Dawson.
The leaves of the beautiful Strelitzias, that we were given two weeks ago, were still going strong earlier this week. One of the leaves was particularly long with a curve such that the upper surface of the leaf could be seen from the front view, if it was placed extending to the left.
Coincidentally one of the flowers from our S. juncea clump had fallen to a near-horizontal position and its flower head turned in the right direction to suit the leaf so that they both faced forward. I worked on the curve of the flower stem to make it match that of the leaf and then set them both in this large tsubo vessel.
This photo shows the fixing technique that I used to hold the stems off the rim of the vessel. I used a very flexible forked branch from the Bay Tree Lauris nobilis, and bent the ends down to follow the curve of the vessel's shoulders. Rather like a natural cross-bar. This elevation of the stems off the rim creates a space underneath and gives a feeling of lightness to the line. However, a stem that extends like this but which rests on the rim of the vessel will look heavy.
The final photo shows the ikebana on the sideboard at night. Hence the photo is a little dark. The shino-glazed woodfired vessel is by the artist Sergio Sill.
As it is Christmas Eve I would like to wish you a peaceful Christmas and good health in the New Year.
Greetings from
Christopher
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The gum flower is beautiful and looks lovely in that container. It's interesting to see the support mechanics you used for the strelitzia arrangement and I didn't realize how large an arrangement that was until your photo of it on the sideboard! Merry Christmas to you and Laurie:)
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