Flowers on Sunday

I was out at Halcyon House Antiques this weekend and went up to the house to pick some flowers. And what gorgeous flowers they were.  I showed you the garden a few weeks ago, and in the middle of September, it’s getting that louche, overgrown look that I adore.

We headed into the garden at around 5:00 p.m. and wonderfully, there were loads of bees buzzing round all of the flowers, and Jonathan warned me to be careful when I was picking flowers because the bees were so active. Bees are disappearing, so it was good to see so many in the garden, although butterflies have been scarce this year.

I came home with a huge bucket of flowers, as well as some large and small tomatoes and some basil. I think that next to peonies and gardenias, dahlias are my favourite flowers.

I quickly set about arranging the flowers, using my trusty champagne bucket. I can’t tell you how helpful a flower frog is when working with flowers like these with heavy heads. You stick the stems in the holes which hold the stems in place. They’re hard to find, but work brilliantly.

After fiddling around a little, I finally made an arrangement that I liked.

I used the burgundy and purple dahlias along with some deep red coxcomb. I’ve set it on a table in front of my Japanese silk painting that I love, and I think it works perfectly.

But I still had some flowers left over. These amazing flowers are Leonotis leonurus aka Lion's Tail. This is an African plant related to mint, with tubular flowers that encircle a square stem. I was fascinated by the plant, never having seen it before.

I knew that this plant called for a tall container, so I pulled out a silver ewer with a rattan handle (to keep it cool to the touch), and put the Lion’s Tail in it.

The plant’s leaves echo the ones in the painting perfectly!

I accidentally cut some of the flowers too short, so I added them to other vases. This one’s floating in a piece of old English china. although you can’t really tell.

This is a deep purple, so dark that it almost looks black.The leaves are such a velvety texture and the colour is just fabulous.

I also loved this purple and white variegated variety.

These flowers just make me so happy and I am pleased to share them with you.

Also garden related, my friend Loi Thai, over at the beautiful blog, Tone on Tone, was up in Baltimore visiting us a few weeks ago, and he had a chance to see this garden, too. Please click here to see Loi’s take on this garden. He took pictures immediately after a rainy day, and I took them the next day which was sunny. It’s fun to see how differently we looked at the same garden.