Party Animals

It’s time. The summer season approaches.

A period that allows us, for a second, to forget the worlds turbulence and celebrate our family, friends, workmates or selves.

Whether it be putting on a spread for your bubble, or hosting your nearest and dearest, your decorator gene deserves some flexing.

And by flexing, I mean employing whatever happens to be growing in the garden as joy to sprinkle around the dining table, bathroom sink, bedside table and all the surfaces in between.

Harvest everything

Leave your tonal, restrained, colour blocking goals inside and arm yourself with secateurs and zero plant prejudice. I have found the happiest visual combinations occur when I simply collect every bloom, odd bits of foliage and seed heads that I can get my hands on. What they lack in charisma as a standalone plant will all change when they are grouped in a vase with new friends.

Gather first, then create a plan based on what you have at your fingertips.

Take another look

Take a fresh look at each plant in your garden. They don’t have to have blooms to be a fun supporting act.

At the moment, I am loving the long tendrils of the stowaway peas from my pea straw that I have allowed to take root. I love the colour of their foliage and trailing form, with or without the sweet little flowers that are starting to emerge. They have proven to be brilliant for the vase when picked once stems are strong.

I also have my eyes on the gone-to-seed parsley as much as the terrific foliage of my thalictrum plants that are yet to flower. Even the spiky seed heads of my half-past-it aquilegia make for playful sculptural shapes as do their scalloped leaves.

Water and warnings

Anything that holds water can be used to house flowers. Jugs, cups, mugs, cans, jars and glass bottles are often things that we can all access.

I have a particularly weak spot for quirky little condiment bottles with cool labels, which make for a fun and modern floral still life when adorned with a spare sprig of whatever is going.

If you are wanting to create a spread of flowers down the centre of a table, use glass as your combining factor by utilising all different shapes and sizes of vessels that might otherwise end up in the recycling bin. This will give a casual, but nice feeling of a collection of arrangements, even if the flowers aren’t all repeated through each vessel.

Without a doubt, the biggest hurdle for new arrangers is to remember to top up vases with water every single day. If you are using narrow-necked bottles and lots of stems, some shorter than others, you may need to top up twice in 24 hours. Set an alarm if you are new to this, as you will gain days and days of vase life if you regularly rejuvenate the water levels.

Combine the crazy

I personally love to challenge myself to create large, tumbling arrangements that are a concentrated reflection of what is going on in my garden at any point in the season. Giant, garden-grown arrangements have a distinctly friendly and nostalgic vibe, compared to those that are store-bought, so embrace the wild and woolly, and channel some grassroots sparkle into your summer spaces.

Popping a big and juicy arrangement at the end of a grazing table, or on the out-of-use log burner definitely injects a sense of occasion into any gathering.

Separate for serenity

Alternatively, you could sift through your harvested selection and create a multitude of different sized arrangements suitable for displaying together, or scattered throughout your home.

I like to line up a mish mash of water-filled glass bottles and jars and simply start filing stems into each.

I distribute my most populous plant types first, also attempting to place my longest stems into the tallest bottles and vice versa. I then thread in my single stems (of the precious plants that I will only snip one bloom off at a time!) and use the rest of the flowers to create little colour or textural stories in their honour. Some bright, some calm and some simple with just one plant type.

Keep filling your bottles until the arrangements have a relaxed “fan outline”, with enough stems to stop them flopping to one side or other. When arranging, I generally try for my arrangement to be 1 to 1.5 times taller than the vase I am using.

So perhaps this is your year to challenge yourself to decorate with what you already have.

Surely garden plants are the most eco-friendly, affordable holiday season decorations around? I bet you’ll surprise yourself with what you can find.

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This is an expanded version of the article featured in my Stuff ‘Homed’ gardening column for beginners , The Press, Dominion Post and other regional papers on November 25th 2021
All words and images are my own, taken in my home and garden in Christchurch, New Zealand unless otherwise captioned.