One Flower's Point of View

In light of yesterday's post, this strip from The Other Coast by Adrian Raeside presents an interesting point of view...

(Click to enlarge)

Forcing Myself to Enjoy the Flowers

You must think the title of this post is strange. I mean, what kind of gardener has to force herself to enjoy flowers? Well, it isn't that hard for me to enjoy them; in fact, I enjoy them a little too much - in my gardens.

I'm one of those people who has a hard time cutting flowers and bringing them inside. I've tried to figure out why this is so difficult for me to do and it's pretty simple, really. I enjoy seeing plants and flowers in their natural environment. Not that our flowers grow naturally in well-defined spaces that suit our tastes, but natural in the sense that the blooms are still attached to the plant that grew them.

Erin Schanen, of The Impatient Gardener, knows exactly what this is like, because she's "one of them" too.  Erin is trying to overcome this aversion to cutting flowers from our gardens by going public with a campaign she calls, "The Garden Appreciation Society."  She's challenging us to cut some flowers, make a bouquet, and post the photo of it online.

Okay, Erin.  I took the bait and rose to the occasion.  But it wasn't easy.  I told you I'd do it, but  in the back of my mind, I just wasn't sure I could.  Then this evening, as I was cutting off the spent tulip stems, I was inspired.  And it wasn't a flower that motivated me.

It was those tulips - the ones that looked great a couple of weeks ago.  The ones that dropped their petals just last weekend.  The ones that made these amazingly awesome seed pods.  Those.

These are the seed pods of one of my species tulips- Tulipa tarda:

Before they do that, they look like this:

I love it when a plant doubles the fun like that.

But anyway, I decided that I'd just use those seed pods and find some other things in the garden to go with them.  Since there's always an abundance of chives and columbine, it didn't pain me too much to cut those blooms.

A little harder to cut were the Euphorbia 'Ascot Rainbow' blooms, but I've got plenty of those too, and I'll be cutting those soon anyway, so that the plant will bulk up and branch out. (Although this Euphorbia doesn't really require any pruning, if you don't want to.)

They've got The Most Awesome Blooms that most people will never notice because they won't get down close enough to see the beautiful detail. Just look at this!

Euphorbia x martinii 'Ascot Rainbow'

 So here's what I came up with for my bouquet:

 

It's small - just 10 inches at its tallest point.  Baby steps...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To see how others are enjoying flowers from their gardens, visit Erin's blog.

Wordless Wednesday: Tree Peony 'Shimanishiki'

Seen in the Smiley Park Children's Garden in Van Wert, OH...

Paeonia suffruticosa 'Shimanishiki'