a freebie in a floral bouquet
My friend Kristin and I share a “flower CSA”. Every week, bouquets of locally grown flowers are dropped off at restaurant/market that is a mile from my house. Kris and I alternate weeks. This week, my bouquet had several stalks of these blue hued glasses, presumably wheat. They are quite pretty. I put this photo into Google image search, and it said it was very likely Utrecht Blue wheat. Any grass/grain experts out there? Tall grasses, both wild and domesticated, are one of my biggest areas of weakness. Every year, I try to commit one or two more species to my mental data base, but for some reason they barely stick: big bluestem, indiangrass, turkey foot grass, canada rye, wild barley, switchgrass, quackgrass, foxtail grasses, squirrel tail grasses, brome, gramma, wild oats…on and on and on. I just googled native grasses of Minnesota, and I found a resource that lists 159 species of grasses. At 3 new-to-me species a year, I’d need to live to age 115 to learn the all. I had better up my average!
blue hued wheat stem (perhaps Utrecht Blue Spring Wheat?)
time of swelling
Everything is maturing, swelling, darkening…in a word, ripening. Including the milkweed seed pods. One of my all time fav seedpods.
Common milkweed seed pods (Asclepias syriaca)
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As child these pods fascinated me, they still do
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3,5,7
When I teach flat-lay composition classes (yes, believe it or not people want such a thing!), one of the techniques I teach is “3,5,7.” In other words, the power of odd numbers in a composition. Any gardener will be familiar with the concept, but a surprising number of creatives are not. Two of anything will always make a line in the mind. Four will almost always make a square. But for whatever reason, odd numbers do not do the same thing in the brain: we don’t see distracting pentagons in our minds eye (lol). We simply see a grouping. Thus I offer you three, not four, summer sunflowers.
three varieties of August sunflowers
almost anodized
Wow! Right? This is nothing more than a dried leaf from the Peace Lily I inherited from my neighbor after her mother’s funeral. It has been sitting, neglected, on my deck all summer. I passive aggressively stopped watering it several weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up with its water demands. So needy! So I let it go. And the leaves dried and now look like this. Wow, right?
dried Peace Lily leaf (Spathiphyllum)
Where do you get your inspiration?
Inspiration is a funny thing. Take this photo for instance:
1. Steve and Joe buy a dehydrator this spring for their culinary explorations.
2. I get a random M. C. Escher image in my Instagram feed and it reminds me of doing tessellations in geometry class in middle school. Which I adored.
3. Unrelated to the above, I pop some day lilies in the dehydrator because I need teaching materials for an upcoming conference and I am curious what will happen to them.
4. The dried day lilies surprise me. They look like M.C. Escher birds.
5. I make a dried day lily tessellation for STILL.
Inspiration is a strange and wonder thing. Q.E.D.
dried day lilies (Hemerocallis)
Why not just ask the CSA farmer what it is? Great idea to share a flower CSA with a friend!
As a gal in her 81st year, I find remembering new plant names is a real challenge these days. Even at your tender age, memory skill is on an unfavorable trajectory, M’dear. Better up that age of 115 to achieve your goal, heh heh.