Bouquets for Monday September 1st

The lisianthus are starting to run out so I can't be as generous with them as I have been for the past several weeks. I have a third sowing coming along but they won't be ready for a few more weeks. I've been using more foliage to make up for fewer lisianthus. I often use few if any "greens", preferring to use small filler flowers instead, but this week nearly all the bouquets contained either baptisa, silver artemesia or Sweet Annie.

Because the contents of the bouquets has not changed much I have been mostly posting pictures of more unusual color combinations. Most of the bouquets are still in more traditional color combinations like red-yellow-orange, pink-white-purple and so on, but I have already posted so many pictures like that it seems silly to post more.

This one is a combination of silver artemesia, salmon zinnias, light purple lisianthus, gladioli and a few spikes of salmon agastache. The agastache has an aromatic, minty smell.



The next is yellow and white with ferny Sweet Annie as a foliage filler. The other flowers are lisianthus, zinnias, helenium (small gold flowers top left) and solidaster.




This last one contains no foliage and a combination of pink lisianthus, red, green and pink zinnias and white statice.

Heirloom tomatoes

I don't grow very many vegetables. This year all I grew were sugar snap peas, lettuce, kale and tomatoes. In 2007 I bought a number of heirloom tomatoes from Project Grow's annual plant sale. My favorite was 'New Brooks', a pinkish beefsteak. I liked it well enough to try saving the seed, something I have never done before. All I did was take some of the seeds and wipe them across a paper towel with my fingertip to remove the pulp and then let them dry for a day or two on the paper towel. Then I removed them from the paper towel and put them in a ziplock bag to be planted this spring.


I planted the seed expecting to get tomatoes like the parent, and some of the 'New Brooks' plants did produce large pinkish beefsteaks similar to the 'New Brooks' I had last year. However, some some produced golden yellow beefsteaks. They are both good but I actually like the gold better.




Something similar happened with cherry tomatoes. I have grown a number of cherry tomatoes over the years, usually hybrids like'Sun Sugar' or 'Sun Gold'. After awhile I started seeing volunteer tomato plants that produced small cherry tomatoes about the size of a grape. They tasted pretty good so last year when I saved the 'New Brooks' seed I saved some seed from the volunteer cherry tomatoes, too. Surprisingly, these seed gave me plants producing two very distinct cherry tomatoes.


The smaller one is about the size of a small grape and is a pale orangey-pink. The larger one is bigger around than a quarter, but smaller than a golf ball and is classic, deep tomato red. They taste very different, too. The larger one is sweet and tastes...well, like a cherry tomato. The smaller one is a little more tart and more fruity or citrusy. I keep eating one and then the other and trying to figure out what is different.


I asked Royer, Project Grow's heirloom seed guru, how he could explain this since he had told me a few years ago that tomatoes typically do not naturally cross pollinate. Royer said that 'New Brooks' is not a very pure strain and he had also seen some of the following generation turn up yellow.


At any rate, these unexpected results have made the whole idea of saving tomato seeds much more fun! I've already saved the seed from all 4 varieties but will have to wait until next year to see what they produce.

Bouquets for Friday August 29th

Once again, no new flowers. I don't think anything new will appear until the asters start blooming in a week or so.

As it turned out, none of the sea hollies I planted came up. However, I did have a couple at the house so I made a bouquet using them.



I also did more purple and orange, a combination I never seem to get tired of.

My friend Deb once told me that she only liked red combined with white so I was thinking of her when I made this last one.

Bouquets for Monday August 25th

I used a lot of Baptisa foliage in these bouquets. I also used Sweet Annie (Artemesia annua) in a few of them. Other than that it is still the same flowers just combined in different ways. Here is an example of the Baptisa foliage. It is almost as blue as eucalyptus, and certainly easier to grow but of course does not have that great scent.


I am getting more comfortable using the silver artemesia foliage. It looks really nice with blues and pinks, it might even work with yellow but I have not tried that. Artemesias all have a sharp, herby scent. I find it invigorating but some people might not like it.

I really liked this simple bouquet of white lisianthus and statice with orange zinnias. I keep meaning to do more like this but orange has generally been in short supply this year. Too much cantelope color and not enough orange.

Bouquets for Friday August 22

No new flowers but a few new combinations. This is Rudbeckia lacinata, light purple lisianthus and solidaster.


Pink lisianthus, white lilies, 'Amazon Rose Magic' dianthus, white zinnias and dahlias. People are always asking about the bi-color snapdragon - it is 'Opus Appleblossom'.




This is salmon pinks zinnias and statice with 'Echo Champagne' lisianthus and some orange gomphrena thrown in as accents.


The same salmon statice and zinnias combined with light purple lisianthus and solidaster.


Finally, white lilies, 'Cinderella White' lisianthus, yellow zinnia and rudbeckia, and solidaster.

There were also purple-white, red-yellow-orange, and all purple bouquets but I've posted plenty of pictures of thoser recently.

Bouquets for Friday August 15th and Monday August 18th

I never got around to posting about last Friday so I'm combining it into Monday. There is not much new to say because the flowers I have been using have not been changing much. Lisianthus, sunflowers, statice, zinnias, feverfew, dianthus, lilies, rudbeckia, ageratum - quite a list when it is all strung together but it has not changed much in the past few weeks.


I've been making lots of purple and white bouquets for the past couple weeks. The only thing in this bouquet that hasn't appeared in previous weeks is the big white dahlia.



I made several for Monday with this somewhat unorthodox color combination of "champagne" lisianthus with yellow statice and cherry red zinnias and dianthus. The lisianthus is able to pick up both the yellow and the cherry colors.

I never seem to get tired of combining apricot or orange and purple. I prefer orange but I've got melon colored lilies so this is what I came up with.


Last Friday I made quite a few bouquets with purple and white lisianthus, fuzzy blue ageratum and pale yellow solidaster.

Each week I end up making a few one of a kind bouquets though I usually don't take pictures of them because only one customer will actually receive one. Here is one that is made up entirely of apricot/peach/salmon colors. It is more Martha Stewart-ish than most of the stuff I do but I really liked it.


Last Friday I made one bouquet using silver and pink that was kind of fun. The silver is from artemesia 'Silver King'.

Looking at the bouquets from the past few weeks you can see why I go to so much trouble to grow lisianthus. They are beautiful cut flowers and I like to be able to have enough to use them generously.

Bouquets for Monday August 11th

Nothing really different today from the past couple weeks. Lilies, lisianthus, liatris, sunflowers, zinnias, statice are the main flowers. The color combinations have been pink-white, all purple, red-white, red-yellow-orange, all similar to ones I have been doing for the past couple weeks.

I did make a few purple and green ones for Monday that were kind of fun:

Bouquets for Friday, August 4th

Still using about the same flowers as for the last couple weeks. Solidaster, a naturally occurring hybrid of goldenrod and aster that I really like has started to bloom. Solidaster has tiny pale yellow flowers that can be combined with almost anything. Here is a picture of it combined with lily 'Suncrest', lisianthus 'Echo champagne' and dianthus 'Amazon Neon Red'.

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I feel like you can take almost anything and combine it with lisianthus and it looks elegant. The next picture is of white lisianthus with yellow zinnias, statice and yarrow and red gomphrena.

In addition, Friday's bouquets included many pink-white, all purple, and red-yellow-orange bouquets similar tot he ones I've been making for the past week or so.

Bouquets for Monday August 4th

Today's flowers were essentially the same as last Friday's. About half the bouquets were either pink-white or the all purple ones. The purple ones looked a little more elegant because I had a perennial statice as a filler.

The rest of the bouquets were red-yellow-orange, lavender-salmon or one of a kind like blue-white or purple-white.The red-yellow-orange bouquets had a stalk of this cool millet, 'Joker' that kind of looks like a cattail.

Bouquets for Friday, August 1st

Whenever I am able to put the bouquets together quickly they turn out nice, and these went together real quick and easy. Lisianthus appeared in pretty much all the bouquets today. I did several like this with just different shades of purple. The lisianthus are 'Twinkle Deep Blue' and 'Echo Lavender' and they are combined with purple liatris, verbena bonariensis, 'Amazon Neon Purple' dianthus, purple zinnias and phlox 'Nicki'.

I did a number with pink lisianthus, white liatris, 'Amazon Rose Magic' dianthus and a red (deep pink) oriental lily called 'Arabian Night'.

With all the yellow flowers available in late summer I combined 'Cinderella Yellow' lisianthus (really a cream), with sunflowers, yarrow, rudbeckia, statice and zinnias to make a number of yellow and white bouquets.

I also made one that was just purple and white. The lisianthus here is 'Echo Blue Rim', combined with white snapdragons, deep blue statice, ageratum and phlox 'Blue Boy'.