In my posting last weekend I was not able to verify Helen's materials, see below. The plant stems were from the Spiked cabbage tree Cussonia spicata and the yellow flowers were Turkish Sage Phlomis russeliana.
At the beginning of the week I attended an event celebrating Sogetsu New South Wales' 65th anniversary and anticipating the Sogetsu School of Ikebana's 100th anniversary which falls next year.
This is a poor quality close-up, taken in haste.
The Sogetsu workshops I attended were led by Master Instructor Misei Ishikawa whom I had first met in 2011. At that time she was regularly working in the classroom at Sogetsu Head Quarters in Tokyo. I was there for three months as a recipient of the Norman and Mary Sparnon Ikebana Endowment scholarship.
The theme of the first Sydney workshop was "Celebration" and we were asked to use either gold or silver leaf flakes in the ikebana. I must confess I am not a great fan of using gold leaf and find it a challenge; which I know is good for me. One of several positive benefits of attending workshops is that the participant is required to do something that they are unlikely to do spontaneously at home. As an interstate visitor, I also had to use an unfamiliar vessel and botanical materials that were provided, not collected by me.
First I chose this narrow necked symmetrical vase which looked quite elegant to me. I then chose two Lady Palm Rhapis excelsa, leaves and two Gerbera flowers. To start, I added the gold leaf in small patches that formed a broken line on one leaf. I wanted to lightly interweave the leaves to give a broad surface and greater volume than if I had use a single leaf. This made it necessary to bend the stems angling them away from each other, then bending them again to bring them back together slightly interlaced. Though it does not show, there is a second red Gerbera behind the leaves.
The second exercise was to take flat sheets of waxed paper and to make them into a three dimensional form. Then we were to arrange branches of Tortuous Willow Salix, into which we included our three dimensional forms. In doing so, it was required that the finer branches of willow were to pierce the paper so that the materials, botanical and artificial, were clearly integrated.
I once again pleated the paper. The green sheet was pleated from corner to corner because this gave it greatest length and some rigidity. By then pinching the folds off-centre and spreading the folds at either end, two pointed fan-shapes were created. The folds in the purple paper were formed parallel to the long side and the ends were bound. Then the middle of the paper was opened out producing a spoon-shape which I placed with its convex surface toward the viewer. I reused one of the Lady palm leaves and added a multi-headed stem of a small yellow Chrysanthemum.
This is my finished arrangement. I had chosen a small vessel that had two openings. This made it possible, after some struggle, to have both the leaf and branch standing upright. However, most of my intertwining of the branch with the leaf was necessary to hold the leaf from flipping to the left and out of the vessel. As a result I had less time to make the intertwining a design element. A single stem of Gypsophila was added as a textural contrast.
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Greetings from Christopher
8th November 2026
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