Last weekend, Hiroshima Peace Day was commemorated by the annual service held at St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne. This year it was the turn of the Victorian Branch of the Sogetsu School to create a large scale ikebana arrangement for the service.
The design and installation of the ikebana was by Aileen Clarke, the Director of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana Victorian Branch, assisted by Susan Healey.
As I made my way to the cathedral, my attention was caught by these two Rainbow Lorrikeets. At first I thought that they were feeding chicks. However, after a short while, it was apparent that they were enlarging a shallow hole where a large branch had been removed some years before. Presumably, the birds were doing this to use the enlarged hollow for nesting.
In my Melbourne class I had set the exercise of making an ikebana using bare, woody branches and Camellias.
Aileen used Coastal Tea Tree as the principal material from which she had stripped off the many finer side branches to reveal its twisting lines. In a large black vessel she set some stems of pink Camellias as a fresh flower contrast.
Marcia arranged some thick rough bark as her woody material and added stems of white Camellias projecting through the holes in the side and top of the cylindrical vase.
Jacqueline arranged a long piece of dry branching wood with a sinuous curving line. It was fixed around the outside of the disk-shaped black vase into which she arranged long stems of Camellia with pink flowers.
My ikebana this week is a return to the winter-flowering red Japonica, Chaenomeles, which is still looking beautiful in the garden. I have arranged two branching stems of the material, which I found surprisingly hard to photograph because the branches radiated in all directions. As a result I have taken the photograph from a rather high angle. Low in the middle of the ikebana are two small masses of white Narcissus nestling between two Arum lily Zantedeschia aethiopica, leaves.
The vase is by the Victorian ceramicist Owen Rye.
Click on the following link to the Sogetsu School of Ikebana Victorian Branch workshop I mentioned last week on the theme, "A Composition Expressing Movement"
Greetings from Christopher
9th August 2026
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