Bouquets for Monday July 28th

Monday's flowers were quite similar to last Friday except I had more lisianthus to work with. I made quite a few combinations with white - purple and white, pink and white, yellow and white. The double lisianthus with the blue edge is 'Echo Blue Rim'. The sweet william is 'Amazon Neon Purple', a first year flowering variety. The spikes are liatris.



The pink and white bouquets contained double lisianthus 'Conderella Pink', pink snapdragons and larkspur, white echinops and white feverfew as filler.

The yellow and white bouquets are about the same as last Friday except these include cream colored lisianthus 'Cinderella Yellow'





This last bouquet contains 'Twinkle Deep Blue' lisianthus combined with liatris, 'Amazon Neon Purple' dianthus. The green flowers are bupleureum. This is the first year I have successfully grown these, they need cold to germinate.

Bouquets for Friday July 25th

The first of the lisianthus I planted last January have started blooming. The ones in the bouquet below are 'Twinkle Blue Blush'. The grass is 'Tapestry' millet, and the sunflowers are 'ProCut Lemon'. There is also a bit of yellow statice and some yellow rudbeckia. This bouquet is 100% annuals.



The next bouquet has pink larkspur, 'Raspberry Wine' mondarda, white statice, red zinnias, 'Natural Feelings' phlox, snapdragons and lily 'Triumphator'. The big lilies are lovely and fragrant but a little hard to incorporate into a bouquet because each flower is held horizontally.

Here is today's version of a red-yellow-orange bouquet. 'Tapestry' millet like in the first one with orange lilies, red snapdragons, and orange and yellow statice. The yellow pom-pom flowers at the top of the bouquet are from plants given to me by a friend. I think they are Rudbeckia laciniata 'Golden Glow'.

Bouquets for Friday July 18th and Monday July 21st

I forgot to take pictures for Friday but the flowers I used were about the same for tomorrow.


Lots of red, yellow and orange bouquets because I had LOTS of red and orange lilies. The first sunflowers have been coming in. I did several sowings of these so they should be appearing regularly for the next couple months.


There were quite a few pink-purple-green bouquets Friday but just a few for Monday. The green spikes are Bells of Ireland. You can also see a couple purple zinnias in there. In the upper center, next to the green spike, is an unusual double phlox called 'Natural Feelings'.



There were also quite a few bouquets that were various combinations of pink, white, blue and purple. I included a picture of this one because it contains white globe thistles (Echinops).


Pink, yellow and white annual statice appeared in most of Monday's bouquets.

Bouquets for Monday July 14, 2008

A few new flowers appeared between last Friday and Monday's bouquets. I have not had time to write anything in detail about most of these and probably won't until this fall.

The first sunflowers have started flowering. There were only a few so most people did not get them but there will be plenty of them by Friday.



I used green nicotiana for the first time. These will not be showing up very often this year because I lost about 2/3 of the plants in the late frost we had on May 29th. This bouquet also contains Echinacea (dead center in the picture), lavender Verbena bonariensis, and annual phlox (white with purple eye on the far left). The purple phlox with the white eye is 'Laura'.



This bouquet is similar to some I made last Friday except it also includes white Lysmachia clethroides (gooseneck flower). the others are larkspur, lilies, astilbe and peonies.



This red, yellow orange bouquet is about the same as last Fridays except it also includes red Crocosmia on the left and right.



Except for the verbena and sunflowers, all the other new flowers - Lysmachia, Crocosmia, Echinacea - are perennials.

Bouquets for Friday July 11, 2008

I really liked the purple and orange bouquets this Friday. The purple in this one is larkspur, an annual relative of delphiniums.

I have shown lots of pictures of red-yellow-orange bouquets this year but these had no white in them. The white really cools them off, these looked really, really HOT.

I made quite a few light blue and pink bouquets like this one. The peonies were harvested more than a month ago and have been waiting in the refridgerator wrapped in plastic.


The pink spikes in this last bouquet are also larkspur. The varigated foliage here is apple mint. It also had some red achillea in it but I don't think you can see it very easily.

Label Problems

I just discovered that Blogger won't let me assign more than 200 characters in labels to a post. When I created the labels I intentionally made them as descriptive as possible - Leucanthemum (Shasta Daisy), Gypsophila (Baby's Breath) and so on - which is now a problem because it doesn't take very many to add up to 200 characters and then some label has to be left off.

When I get a chance (which unfortunately may not be right away) I figure out what I have to do to shorten the labels.

Bouquets for Monday July 7th, 2008

All the bouquets are still made up of at least 80%-90% perennials. A few annuals are trickling in - baby's breath, snapdragons, clarkia - but all the big flowers are still perennials like delphiniums and lilies.

As more and more flowers come in I am able to use more color schemes each week. Monday's flowers included these:

Blue-yellow-white pretty much the same flowers except I now have Centaurea macrocephala.

I've will keep making this light blue and coral combination as long as the Clarkia hold out. I really like it.

Yellow-red-orange (and sometimes white) is a color scheme I use fairly often but it looks different throughout the year as the flowers change.

Blue-pink-white (and sometimes crimson) is a classic combination for a perennial border that I always think looks good in a vase. The white and pink pinwheel phlox is 'Natasha', and the red-purple monarda is 'Raspberry Wine'. The red monarda 'Jacob Kline' that you see above is true red - it doesn't really have any orange in it so it can be combined with both oranges and pinks, but 'Raspberry Wine' definitely has a lot of blue in it. Both of these monardas are resistant to powdery mildew.

Purple or lavender with orange or melon is the color combination people most often comment on. The colors are a bit deceptive in the photo. The orange lily and the butterfly weed are brilliant ORANGE, not almost red as they appear in the picture.

Bouquets for Friday July 4th, 2008

I again forgot to take pictures but it doesn't matter much because the bouquets were about the same as Monday's. I did do a few extra red white and blues.

Bouquets for Monday, June 30th

I was pretty much working with same flowers as last Friday. I made one red-white-blue bouquet that turned out pretty well so I may try to do more of these on Friday. The bright red flowers are Monarda didyma 'Jacob Kline', and the airy little white flowers are annual baby's breath (Gypsophila elegans)



Quite a few bouquets were purple and orange. The achillea you see in the middle left of the bouquet is 'Terra Cotta'.

I also made a few red-yellow-white bouquets with white delphiniums and red lilies. The big bright yellow daisy is Heliopsis scabra, a really great long lived perennial I have not had time to write about yet.

Most of the others were similar to Friday's: blue-yellow, blue-pink-white, pink-purple-green and pale blue-salmon.