May Bouquet: Daffodils Again

I've done my third bouquet for the season. This is going to be even more fun now because my sister Patti is also going to join the fun. I talked to her on the phone last Friday, and she was just as excited as I am about doing bouquets throughout the season and posting pictures on Facebook and talking about what is blooming. We also thought that part of our creativity can include the container - vases, bowls, whatever we like, that can keep it fun and interesting.

In that spirit, I have departed this week from the simple glass bowl and have used my blue jug for this bouquet.

The daffodils are still gorgeous, and the blue jug makes the yellows and creamy whites and even the salmony centers just pop. I may have enough daffodils next weekend for one more arrangement, but they are definitely dwindling. Tonight Jeff commented that there are almost no daffodils left in the yard. A clear exaggeration of course - we have at least a hundred blooms out there yet! But he does like to give me grief.

I'm already scoping out the yard for next week's flowers. Lilacs, alliums, and peonies all are looking like good candidates. Lamium is blooming right now, plus violas and brunnera and lungwort and harebell are all still going strong too. After doing this week's arrangement in the big blue jug, I think next week I'll do something smaller and more delicate. A small vase would work well for lots of small spring flowers. And, the fun part of moving away from daffodils is that I can mix and match flowers and add greenery. Daffodils kind of have to stand alone because of their knack for poisoning other plants that share their water.

Of course, I've never really tried that. It might be a fun experiment to put a couple daffs in a vase with something else, and then have another vase with just the something else, and see what happens. Hmmm. I'm always looking for something new and fun and scientific to do with Ian. That would be a good one. I actually have a pineapple top in a flowerpot right now to see if it will grow as everybody says. This will be a good experiment to put next to it. I hope he doesn't complain to all his friends when he gets older about his mom who made him do all these weird garden things. Poor kid. I think he'll survive, and he might even learn something. :)

Daffy Bouquets are In The House!

I love fresh flowers in the house. I love seeing them on the table bringing in the feel of the outdoors, and I love smelling their freshness, and the whole natural aura that they bring with them. I love them and even though I have a ton of fresh flowers outside in the yard, I don't usually bring them inside. I cannot tell you why. Maybe I have a fear of ruining the look of the outdoor gardens if I snip a dozen for indoors, which is silly when there are usually a hundred blooms at any given time.

So this year I am paying attention to my dining table like never before, and I plan to have a fresh bouquet on it at all times. This will not be that ambitious, as I have oodles of fresh flowers right outside the door for most of the season, and as I also enjoy picking the flowers and making pretty arrangements. I just need something to encourage myself to do it. And for me, my encouragement this year is taking a picture of each bouquet and posting it, first to Facebook, where hopefully friends will comment and tell me how gorgeous each is and how lucky I am to have such lovely flowers, and secondly here, where I'll have a permanent record of flower bouquets throughout the season that I can look at next winter and remember fondly. A bonus may be that I will notice there are times of the season when the pickings are slim, and then next spring I will plant a few plants to fill in those lean times.

So without further ado (I have no idea what that really means but it always sounds grand), here are my first two bouquets of the season. The picture on the top is the first one I made, mostly as a side-effect from gathering flowers for my neighbor whose husband was turning forty. I didn't get him anything, but certainly for organizing and planning the big party she deserved something cheerful, no? The second arrangement, on the bottom, was really planned to be flowers for my table, and for that particular vase, so it looks much fuller and cuter. Definitely I notice between the two, spaced about a week apart, that the carnation-like daffodils are more abundant a little later in the season, as are the peach colors. The trumpets and the bright yellows were more common earlier in the season.

I could totally have picked earlier bouquets. They would have had to be mainly King Alfreds for the first couple weeks of April, but that would be just fine with me. Those bright yellow trumpets are so welcome after a long winter, I honestly can't think why I didn't pick some and bring them in. I think it will be fun for the rest of the season seeing how the flowers change and what kinds of bouquets can happen each week.

It would be even more fun if I had someone else doing it with me. My sister Patti gardens about an hour north, I wonder if I could talk her into doing the same thing, and sharing the pictures on Facebook so we could see each others creations. That would be kind of neat, because we have different bloom times and different flowers. I'm zone 4 so should have earlier and later blooms in spring and fall, but she has a serious warm zone 5 corner on the back side of the garage, plus she has an immense gorgeous sunroom that she grows plants in all winter. She could totally out-flower me for the year. I'm going to send her an email tomorrow and see if she's up for the game, it should be a lot of fun. Even if she doesn't participate I'm going to have a great time doing it all by myself anyhow. I'm already looking forward to the next bouquet!