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What’s more beautiful than fresh flowers in your home? This time of year I don’t have any large flowers blooming or large amounts of blooms. So, this is a great time of year to make small, sweet bouquets.
This morning I went out to the garden and picked pansies and some lovely patterned leaves. A good trick to making a great bouquet from your garden is to arrange as you pick. Instead of picking a bunch of flowers and taking them inside to rearrange, I arrange them one-by-one, in my hand, as I am picking them.
I used one large leaf as a frame for each small bouquet. To secure the arrangement, I wrapped wire around the stems to hold them together and preserve the arrangement. Any type of thin wire works.
When I got inside, they were ready to drop into water. I chose two antique chemistry beakers. I’m a huge fan of antique chemistry glass. I always keep an eye out for them at second hand stores and antique shops. They make such elegant vases!

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I’m on blue and red kick in the front garden! This is the third year in a row that I have used red and blue in my front window box and the narrow garden patches along my front walk way.

Unbelievably, the forget-me-nots volunteered in my second story window box. For three or four years now I’ve just had to remove the extra volunteers and leave enough to fill in around the new plantings. Red ranunculus and blue pansies are excellent spring flowers along with these airy forget-me-nots.

Eventually I’m planning on replacing the ranunculus and forget-me-nots with red geraniums and sky blue lobelia. The pansies should last into mid summer if the weather stays cool enough!

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This last weekend the sun came out and I followed it to my garden! I planted my dahlias, weeded, watered the sweet peas, and supervised the final replanting of the Irish Yew hedge in back. The most rewarding task was admiring the beauty of the spring blooms and green growth. With the spring rains and a few days of sunshine, the garden is lush and the forget-me-nots are in full blossom.

These delightful billows of tiny blue blooms line my driveway. Every year they volunteer here and all over my yard. Planted by the birds or the breeze, the forget-me-nots have multiplied over the years and are an integral part of my spring gardens.

When the blossoms die down in a couple of weeks and the plants have produced some seeds, I’ll pull all of them and replace them with annuals. By fall there will be a scattering of small starts that will mature and bloom next spring. The garden just continues to give and I am the happy recipient!

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Earlier this spring I purchased two garden urns from Judy Hillman at Madrona Hills Ace Hardware here in Salem, Oregon. I was attracted to the elegant form and the charm of the woven metal trellis patterned urns.

I wasn’t sure where they would end up but after moving the urns around my garden, I found just the right spot! Now comes painting, placing and leveling.

HERE’S HOW TO DO IT:

1. I set up on my kitchen table for a dry, clean place to work. I cleaned the surface of all dust and rust and then I used throw away foam brushes to paint the urns.
2. It’s important to create some kind of base for planters that you put directly in the garden so that the container drains properly and sets straight. I used 8 cut in half, recycled bricks to form a circle an inch larger in diameter than the urn bases. First I leveled the ground by eye and then set the bricks in the soil with a rubber mallet. I used a level to get them perfect.
3. I used sphagnum moss to line the urns and wrap around a separate pot inside the urn. I used a recycled pressed paper pot. This set-up will make it easy to remove the plants and put the urns away for winter.
4. The last step was to add the plants! I divided a large clump of hostas from the yard to plant in the urns.

The paint I chose for the urns is the same as my front trellises. Several years ago I matched color chips to the green copper roof above my front door and discovered Benjamin Moore’s Waterbury Green (HC-136), also from Madrona Hills Ace Hardware. I love this color in the garden because not only does it match my copper roof, but because it also looks stunning with all of the various colored blooms that are climbing and nestled in and around the trellises and urns.

Nicotiana reseeds in my garden every year. I am thankful for such generous gifts from last years flowers. The small starts are called volunteers. This is a good time to get these transplanted in a place that works in the garden design so that by summer they are established and blooming in just the right spots.

I originally enjoyed the nicotiana volunteers for three or four years when I planted seeds in the house we lived in before. This move took place 22 years ago. We had moved in the winter time so I couldn’t transplant any nicotiana plants, but, the following spring at our new house I was delighted to discover nicotiana volunteers coming up in several of the potted boxwoods we had moved.

Nicotiana (nicotiana alata grandiflora) is an old fashioned heirloom variety that has fragrance in the evening and grows three to five feet tall. It is covered with an abundance of lovely trumpet blooms that last all summer and into the fall. The flower colors vary from white and cream to many varieties of pink and an especially exquisite violet purple.

This variety like many of the nicotiana varieties that are available at plant stores is an annual, however, most of the commercially grown plants are hybrids that are compact and dwarf and do not reseed.

To date I have had over twenty five years of flowers, fragrance and beauty from one planting of one packet of seeds.