Bringing your garden indoors
Harvesting for the vase ultimately takes away from the atmosphere you have cultivated in your garden, but finds there are ways to reduce the impact.
My pathway to growing a garden was fully inspired by the promise of picking for my home, providing a gateway and motivation to learning to grow my own ‘‘soul food’’.
In this article and next week’s followup, I’ll share entry-level tips to harvesting, preparing and displaying your own blooms inside.
It’s an uncomplicated activity that offers a reprieve in a busy day and a distraction for a busy mind. The growing of ‘‘soul food’’, as opposed to actual ‘‘food’’, is of different but worthy value to your wellbeing.
Abundant stems of flowers in the garden are equally enjoyable in a vase, yet filling your home with flowers undoubtedly causes an aesthetic blow to the beds they came from. Harvesting for the vase ultimately takes away from the atmosphere you have cultivated in your garden, but there are ways to reduce the impact.
The No 1 option would be to nominate a bed as a ‘‘cutting garden’’ that you can rampage through with snips and not pillage your general gardenscape.
The second alternative is taking the time to nibble blooms from the back of the plant and spots with less visual impact.
Sometimes, I’ll even wait until I know a flower has days left of being at its best, snip it off and pop into a shortlived arrangement, getting the best of it for inside and out.
Vases and support
Anything goes. Glasses, mugs, jugs, jars, bottles and any other watertight vessel. Part of the fun and creativity of displaying your flowers is to play around with what they are in.
Vessels with narrow tops are handy for supporting stems, however you can’t fit as many in. Wide openings present a new challenge, as they remove a lot of support but, in my eyes, open up the potential for that lovely rambling vibe.
Remember those heavy, spiky metal squares and rounds at your gran’s house? These are called ‘‘flower frogs’’, or commonly now known as kenzan, and are very handy. Scan online trading platforms and second-hand shops for the originals or search online for the modern versions. They simply sit in the bottom of your vase and you build your arrangement by spiking stems into their centres.
Another fantastic, liberating option is chicken wire. I prefer the coated type and roughly cut up a square of it, guestimating about 1.5 times the size of the vessel it needs to fill. I then crudely curl it over to create a pillow form and push it inside the vessel. This acts as a reusable and super effective support for stems in all manner of vases.
If you are dealing with longer, heavier stems, you should add some extra support by crisscrossing the rim of the vase with florists’ ‘‘pot tape’’. It is skinny, very sticky tape that you can easily buy online. However, mostly, I find that the chicken wire can be jammed pretty well into the vases if the top is narrower than the base.