SUMMER FLOWERS FROM THE GARDEN

Beside a nearby road, for the second time recently we saw a relative of Spike.

The Echidna was feasting on what must have been an extensive ant nest or other ground living insects. 

Of course Laurie and I kept very still and quiet while we watched as it worked its way along the bank by the side of the road. 

When it got to my shoes and started inspecting my socks for ants I had to suppress my impulse to laugh. The Echidna soon concluded my socks did not harbour ants and continued its foraging.

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Meanwhile in the garden...

...the Spanish Broom Spartium junceum, is having a second flowering this season. I assume this is because of the rainy days we had in the last weeks of December.

 

The Red Valerian (actually pink) Centranthus ruber is flowering in smaller numbers this year, as I pulled out a number of the self-seeded plants. 

I used these Summer flowers as the materials for my first ikebana this week.

  

I arranged three branches of the Broom and added two flower heads of the Valerian in the centre toward the back and partially hidden. This fairly simple ikebana is arranged in a formal-looking style because I have kept all the fine stems in a single line arising from the centre. The vessel is a cup that Laurie bought from the New Zealand ceramicist Elena Renka when we visited in March last year.

Also to my delight the Bromeliad Aechmea gamosepala, has produced three flowers. My internet browsing has taught me that this variety is called "Lucky stripe". This plant was a gift from my sister-in-law Helen, and has only been in our rather dry ground for a couple of years.

There is also slightly less Scabiosa atropurpurea flowering this year, as I removed quite a lot of it in winter as well. I am hoping that I did not pull out the white ones as they are rare in our garden. I used these two materials in my second ikebana.

Because of the blue tips on the Bromeliad flowers and the fineness of the Scabiosa, I decided to use these three glass bottle-shaped vases. The flowers and vases are placed so that their movement is toward the centre. My first teacher Carlynne would have said the materials are talking to each other. I also added a stem of leaves only, from the Red Valerian in the third vase. My aim was to keep the ikebana feeling light and summery with the water in the glass to be an important element.

Greetings from Christopher

28th January 2023

CORYMBIA FICIFOLIA

The summer weather on the Surfcoast has continued to be variable, but most of the last week was pleasantly warm and stable.

On Tuesday we had an early walk on the beach. However, the tracks in the sand reveal that quite a few people got there before us. The following day we were in Melbourne for a couple of catch-up events with friends. It also gave us the opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Victoria and see some of the installation work in the Triennial exhibition.

 

I was captivated by this wonderful installation: Mun Dirra (Manigrida Fish Fence), a beautiful work of dyed and hand-woven Pandanus fibre. The work is in several suspended panels that form curving screens which invite the viewer to immerse themselves in a richly-textured, warm-coloured space. The sensation of floating in flowing water was quite strong for me.

 

 

For several weeks now I have been enjoying the brilliant colours of some nearby Flowering gums Corymbia ficifolia. This bright red one is in our garden.

Not so far away is this vivid orange one that looms over a fence.

Also close by is another orange one that has passed its peak. The recent rain has knocked many of the fine stamens onto the footpath making a very fine, red carpet. I have been thinking of using these flowers as an ikebana subject for a while.

 

I gathered two clusters of the orange flower as I wanted it to be the principal subject. Then I picked a tight bunch of red flowers from our tree. These were fairly easy to arrange into two masses with the colours separated. I set the orange flowers to the front and left side. The red flowers were set behind and to the right of the orange flowers with a clear space between the two groups. On the window sill in the kitchen I had some Kangaroo fern Zealandia pustulata, that I had pruned from beside the path. It had been threatening to take over the path. The green of the fern made a good strong colour contrast to the red and provided a clear asymmetry to the design.

The vase is by Graeme Wilkie and has two broad vertical, brush-stroke like lines, that are very close in tone to the orange flowers.

Greetings from Christopher

21st January 2024

SUMMER COLOUR

The weather on the Surf Coast has been quite fickle; typical of Victoria, is the common view. On Christmas day and the week following, it was cool and wet. However, in the last week it seemed like summer had arrived. A welcome change for the holiday visitors who have come to Torquay to enjoy the beach.

The gardener's pleasure is to see the summer flowers. I recently replaced my possum barrier beneath the frame that supports the climbing Lorraine Lee rose. The new barrier is corrugated colour-bond edging and seems to be working well.

This is the most prolific flowering of this plant to date. Of course the rain has helped.  The potted Hydrangeas are also doing well.

This vivid pink one has only produced small flowers this year. 

Small flower size was not a problem for this particular vase/vessel. Laurie bought it for me when we visited the Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa last November. His specific comment was, "...this will be both your Christmas present and your next birthday present...". We both really liked the elegance of the design of this vessel. The kiln is a family-owned business. Interestingly, the current head of the family commented that his father made a number of these vessels about thirty years ago. This being one of the last remaining from that time. He also said that he could not reproduce the exact colour of this glaze as the recipe and details of the firing process were lost.

Vase or sake carafe?

Both!

I was happy with the colour contrast between the glaze and the Hydrangea. The small size of the vessel required a simple arrangement.

Also in the garden a couple of patches of Crassula arborescens, ...

...are looking their best. This one is partially shaded by the Apricot tree. Consequently, some of the flower stems are growing at a low angle.

When I brought some of the flowers inside I noticed how their orange matched some of the rather orange-ish tones in this Bizen vase. This was the other ceramic purchase by Laurie last November. This time at the Yakimono-World Fair and Exhibition in the grounds of Nagoya castle. It was made at the Gorobee Kiln in Okayama.

This was the start of my arranging the materials in the Bizen vase. The overall darkness of the vase makes it dominant and the flower mass look small.

I have made a loose mass with the flowers, trying to maximise the visibility of their orange colour. I then added some lines with the green strap-like leaves of Lomandra lingifolia. The leaves gave the ikebana some movement and created spaces which allowed the flowers to "breathe".

Greetings from Christopher

14th January 2024

 

A SECOND LOOK

By the end of last Spring, the end of November, the Strelitzia juncea in the garden had more than 25 flower stems. As I noted back then, it was the best flowering this clump has produced. Now however, the flowers have faded and the petals shrivelled to a dry, dark-brown state. This is the way of things, of course; and one of the joys of the plant world is the seasonal change we observe.

I took this photo of one of the last two flower stems, showing the drying petals as well as the final coloured petals for this season. I have previously been struck by the extraordinary colour that remains in the stem and spathe in this phase. I had pruned all of the other finished flower stems last week. After throwing several into the compost I felt I should not waste those that remained. Their colour and shape demanded the attention of my ikebana eye. I felt this material provided a challenge to my ikebana mind. 

Once before I had been struck by the colours that remained in the flower stems after flowering. In March 2020 I created the ikebana below.

In this instance the focus is on the pink at the back of the "neck", if the flowers were indeed "birds".

Last week I first focused on the shapes of three double-headed Strelitzia flower stems. For preparation I used olive oil to clean some of the sticky substance exuded from the flower spathe. Then I wiped the oil off with a paper towel, leaving a soft sheen to the surface.

 

This is the final ikebana. I re-used the fading leaves from a bunch, with flowers included, that were given to us four weeks ago. Unfortunately the flattening effect of the photograph removes the feeling of depth and the way the secondary flowers interact with each other.

The suiban is by the New Zealand ceramic artist Elena Renka.

Yesterday I decided I had to use the rest of the flowers I had set aside. To start with I used the same cleaning process described above. Then I observed that the spathes of the flower heads presented different angles to the main stem. Many were almost at right angles. But a couple "looked down" and a few more were "looking up".

I have used the spent flowers to make an ikebana in which the lines are closely placed to create a very structured arrangement of lines and angles. None of the flower heads actually touch each other and all of them face inwards toward the midline. The one downward facing flower I used is at the back. The right angle flowers were placed next then the upward looking flowers were placed highest. This placement gave a certain logic to the ikebana and an over-all coherence of design.

The following three quarter and side views shows the depth of the arrangement.

The vessel is by the Victorian ceramic artist Isabella Wang.

 

Greetings from Christopher
7th January 2024

TREE PHILODENDRON

In the week before Christmas I had a brief walk along the Barwon River at Newtown as I was early for an appointment. 

There was a light drizzling rain when I came across this patch of waterlilies, that I thought looked quite beautiful. A calming moment before seeing the dentist.

Last weekend we went to Melbourne for Christmas and had the luxury of a slow walk around the Royal Botanic Gardens.

 

There I saw more water lilies. Almost the whole surface of one of the upper lakes was covered in pink waterlilies.

 

This individual flower near the water's edge looked particularly beautiful.

As did this mass of pink, mauve and purple Hydrangeas.

 

There was a whole bed of this dark blue Agapanthus. One of the cultivars that has appeared in recent years.

Summer is the flowering time for one of my favourite native trees, the Illawara Flame Tree Brachychiton acerifolius. In Victoria, if the conditions are right, it will loose all of its leaves before the spectacular flowering.

This close up of a panicle reveals part of the reason the flowering is so dramatic. The stems of the flowers are also the same intensely bright red. This panicle was on a tree in the Ian Potter Foundation Children's Garden at the Botanical Garden.

Which is where we also came across this tree where something small may live.

Over the past couple of months in the Botanic gardens I have noticed an unusual event. In a number of places around the garden some clumps of bamboo have started flowering. Bamboos flower infrequently, usually after 40 - 80 years. However, some species only flower after very long intervals, as much as 120 -130 years. 

In this photo it is easy to see that the flowers look like those of other grasses. 

 

In this photo most of the bamboo has already turned brown and is dying. It is a mass flowering event in which all the plants in the cohort will flower and then decline and die. Seeds that fall from these plants will start the regrowth of the patch.

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Recently I re-introduced our Tree Philodendron Thaumatophyllum bipinnatifidum to the conservatory. The unfortunate, but very resilient, plant had spent the better part of two years out in the garden suffering considerable neglect. Finally, three or four months ago, I re-potted the plant and started to treat it more respectfully in the conservatory. It has responded well to the warmth, watering and feeding, by producing some larger leaves and two smaller shoots at the bottom. 

One of the leaves recently yellowed and began to die (of old age) first turning a beautiful bright yellow. This made it an interesting, somewhat largish, ikebana subject.

Because of a noticeable curve in its stem I decided to use this large curving vessel by Graeme Wilkie. The yellow leaf is the main subject but needed a foil. Green seemed best to highlight the yellow. I chose a fading leaf from the Strelitzia nicolai that had some autumnal tonings and a similar curve. With such strong materials, nothing else was needed.

I would like to wish you all a healthy and Happy New Year.

Greetings from Christopher
31st December 2023

 

SEASON'S GREETINGS

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

24th December 2023

 

STRELITZIAS

  

Summer is definitely in the garden. Such a change from a week ago.

The Red Flowering Gum Corymbia ficifolia, that we planted five years ago is now about two and a half metres tall. I noticed the buds forming some weeks ago, which now have begun to open. It looks splendid on a sunny day and is obviously very attractive to the bees.

I took this photo of the largest clump of African Iris Dietes Grandiflora, in the garden a couple of weeks ago. On the previous evening I had noticed that the clump was covered in unopened buds. The next day was predicted to be warm, after a cool spell. True to form, all the flowers opened at once making a very conspicuous splash of bright white in the garden. It ocurred to me later that the simultaneous flowering may well be a strategy to provide a highly visible target to attract pollinating insects.

Also the Strelitzia juncea is flowering well, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. In spite of that, I was delighted when we were visited by friends who brought a gift of some Strelitzia reginae including several large leaves with very long stems.

This gift was presented to Laurie but provided an enjoyable challenge for me. I took advantage of the long stems to create this ikebana in a large Shigaraki storage vessel. I massed five leaves in a line to the left. Four flower heads form a mass in the centre and a fifth flower provides a counter movement to the right. A sixth leaf is placed forward to neaten the mouth of the vessel, by concealing the stems of the massed flowers.

Later I re-used two of the leaves and three flowers in a suiban. I particularly like the form of Strelitzia leaves and find them very elegant. The tallest leaf is mostly seen from the back. However, at the top the leaf twists a little showing more of the upper surface. A shorter flower at the back gives depth to the ikebana while the flower on the right creates an interesting space. 

The suiban has an ovoid shape formed by a sinuous line. It was made by Graeme Wilkie at his studio, Qdos, in Lorne.

Greetings from Christopher

17th December 2023