March 20th is just around the corner – thankfully! And blooms are everywhere – under our noses, poking through the soil, erupting from branches, and filling our vases. Hurrah!

Here are some of the hints of spring that have come my way:

Kay's flowering quince branches and the delicate hellebores make for a stunning, early spring bouquet!

1. A DIY designer gets inspired by her own garden’s bounty. Earlier this week, an email with this charming photo appeared in my in-box from Kay Christie, who attended one of my demonstrations at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show last month. Thanks so much for sharing, Kay! And for the kind words. Keep designing!

I wanted to show you an arrangement I just made with cuttings from my garden. I really loved your demo at the flower and garden show. It gave me the idea for this. I also used chicken wire inside to hold the stems. Thanks do much for the inspirational talk.

A silver pitcher contains a sublime bouquet in a pink-and-gold palette, by Peggy Shelley.

2. A talented gardener clips goodies from her backyard for a special arrangement. Like Kay, Woodinville, Wash., gardener Peggy Shelley harvests beautiful floral ingredients from her landscape. I visited Peggy and her husband Al Shelley (also a gifted gardener) earlier this month to interview them for an upcoming Better Homes & Gardens article about their garden (the feature will appear in the August 2012 edition). There was a gorgeous bouquet on the kitchen counter and of course, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It included pink-flowering Japanese pieris, bi-colored pink-and-green euphorbia stems, golden thread branch cypress sprigs and lemon-yellow privet foliage. Peggy told me something quite inspiring – and I’m going to remind myself of her passion every time I head into my own garden:

The biggest satisfaction of my garden comes from making a bouquet and giving it to a friend.

Lynn Fosbender of Pollen, an eco-friendly floral designer in Chicago, with her beautiful bouquet of local spring tulips.

3. Local flowers arrive just in time for a Chicago designer. Last Sunday, I was in Chicago to speak at the Chicago Flower & Garden Show (thanks, Bill Aldrich, for inviting me!). I called Lynn Fosbender, who owns Pollen, a sweet, ec0-conscious floral studio, and asked if she could bring a bouquet to my talk and also pass out her business cards. I wanted to showcase Lynn as a home-town resource for Chicago area floral customers, and let them know about her intentional design philosophy of using local flowers whenever possible. “I’d love to come,” she said. “But March 11th is still pretty early. I probably won’t be able to find local flowers from my sources.”

Then, to my delight, Lynn showed up with a vase of the most stunning vibrant orange-and-green parrot tulips I’d ever seen! “Spring has been mild here – and one of my local growers called me on Friday to let me know his tulips were ready to harvest,” Lynn said. What a wonderful treat. I wrote a post about Lynn when I first met her in 2012. Here’s a link to that story. I was so impressed with her vision for her business:

For several years I thought I would like to own a full-service flower shop that was eco-friendly. I knew if anyone should do it, it should be me.

Spring's yellow and lime floral gifts collected in a green vase.

4. See what my own garden yielded this week. I’ve been making a local and seasonally-inspired floral arrangement every single week for the past 20 weeks (since the first week of November). It’s part of my plan to create a book or blog called 52-Weeks-of-Local-Flowers. It’s been fun, creative, and very educational to discover what I can source from local growers, local farmers’ markets, and of course, my own backyard.

Yellow and green are the theme of this week! I used two types of euphorbia (dipping the cut stems in boiling water helped “seal” the ends so the milky white sap didn’t drain into the vase); two types of daffodils that the prior owners of our home planted on the parking strip along the street; lots of bright-yellow-flowering forsythia; and some lovely variegated foliage from the scented geranium plant I’ve been babysitting in my garage under the shop lights. Everything came together nicely in a small green-glazed vase and a vintage flower frog held the stems in place.

Today, strangely, it’s snowing in Seattle. I soaked my sweet pea seeds in water last night and I plan to plant them in flats in the garage today. I had wanted to weed and prep the beds, but really? I think I’ll wait and see if it warms up a bit! Happy Almost-Spring!

Tulips as Fashion at the new Seattle Nordstrom Rack Store

Right after the first of the year, an e-mail arrived in our in-box via The 50 Mile Bouquet blog.

“Hi – I am the Home Buyer for Nordstrom Rack. I am looking for a local floral resource to put together a floral program for our downtown Seattle Rack, which we are relocating to Westlake in March. We want this store to be special! We will have a lobby space where we’d like to sell fresh, local bouquets daily, a la Pike Place Market. Would you be able to meet with me to discuss this?”

The correspondent was Kelly Smith, Nordstrom Rack’s home and gift buyer who later told me that things like the new floral program defaulted to her because she’s a “Jill of all trades” and besides, someone there decided that the woman responsible for buying vases for the Rack is more likely to know about flowers than someone who buys handbags or cosmetics.

I was intrigued and agreed to meet with Kelly and some of her colleagues back in January. To be honest, there was an idea brewing in the back of my mind that I could get a little floral business going and drag one of my creative girlfriends into the adventure.

But Kelly and her team were very ambitious and exact in their vision. It soon became clear to me that while they might need my advice to come up with the right flower calendar, week-by-week, they would need someone with a larger-scale wholesale operation than I would ever have (or want to have, for that matter).

Nordstrom designed its own mod flower buckets with racks on wheels ~ cool!

Eventually, I helped Kelly find a local wholesaler who is now sourcing flowers from local farms, sorting and bunching the stems, and making daily deliveries to the new Nordstrom Rack on the corner of 5th and Pine (in the former Talbot’s location at Westlake Mall). How did Nordstrom come up with this idea of selling locally-grown cut flowers along with designer shoes and bargain-priced fashions for women and men?

“We knew we had this really great lobby space, right off of Westlake, but it’s not a selling space,” Kelly points out. “We started brainstorming about what we could do to create the Pike Place Market feeling near Westlake.” [Locals and tourist alike know that the Rack was located for years at 2nd and Pine, just across the street from the Pike Place Market.] “Selling flowers ties us back to the community and supports the local floral industry.”

When the Rack opens on Thursday, March 15th, shoppers will be able to buy a bunch of 15 gorgeous local tulips for $10. This week, the palette includes yellow, orange and red tulips. Next week, according to Kelly, the palette will include white, purple, light pink and dark pink. “They are so vibrant and beautiful,” she enthused. In future weeks, you’ll see a wide range of flowers, depending on the seasonal crops being harvested from local fields. Just like the fashion discoveries at the Rack, the floral offerings will be ever-changing.

It will be fascinating to watch how bargain-oriented Rack customers respond to the $10/bunch floral program. The overall vision is to make cash-and-carry cut flowers so accessible that everyone who walks through that lobby will want to grab a bunch on their way out of the store.

With that plan on my mind, I was thrilled to be invited to tonight’s “Tweet Up” pre-opening gala for (mostly) fashion bloggers. I was probably the only non-fashion blogger or Tweeter in attendance, but don’t worry – I found lots to grab my attention. Enjoy the photos here.

LOCAL Flowers-to-Go at Nordstrom Rack

Purple, Green, and Teal desserts to match the Rack Logo - yum!

Tonight's preview party drew 150 fashion bloggers (and me!)

Style Hunter offering up cocktails at tonight's pre-opening soiree

Flowers also appear on a Dolce and Gabanna silk jacket. Originally $2,945, the new Rack price is $939.97. Tempting. . .

On the left, a $75 cut glass Kate Spade vase, now selling for $59. Thanks, Kelly - a great find and I brought it home with me!

More flowers on the toes of Marc Jacobs' shoes, marked down to $299 from $695. Too bad they were 1/2-sizes too small for moi!

SUNSET GIVEAWAY

I’ve drawn names of all those who answered my question below and here are the five “winners” of a FREE copy of The New Sunset Western Garden Book, courtesy of Sunset. The question: What is your favorite ornamental landscaping plant (shrub, grass, perennial, etc.) to harvest for a cut bouquet? yielded these winners/answers:

Jen Y: peonies

Paula: bunnytails grass blossoms or pilotus joey

Carol: Peonies, nandina branches and berry clusters

Nicole: hellebores

Kim: dahlias

CONGRATULATIONS! You will soon be hearing from Dana Smith of Sunset Publishing, who needs your mailing address.

I recently had a chance to interview Kathleen Brenzel, garden editor for Sunset magazine – and editor of Sunset’s new, 2012 edition of The New Sunset Western Garden Book,  (Sunset Books, $34.95 for flexible binding, $44.95 for hardcover), a “bible” for western gardeners.

Whether you’re new to gardening or have logged many planting seasons with your hands in soil, it’s the single best go-to reference for garden-makers in our region. As chunky as the Yellow Pages, this essential guide to the West’s ornamental and edible landscape has been around for 80 years. I’ve owned every version since the early 1990s, including the most recent 2007 edition, which is dog-eared from much use.

When I got my hands on the just-released ninth edition last month, I thought: How different can this really be? I asked Kathy to walk us through the book’s 768 pages:

How did you go about updating this edition? Before we did anything else, we assembled a panel with landscape architects, horticulture educators from UC Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, nursery people and new graduates who had used our last edition as a textbook. The recent grads told us that in order to make “The New Sunset Western Garden Book” relevant, it had to have a digital component. They said: “We go everywhere with our smartphones, so we want to be able to take a photo of a plant we see on the hiking trail and look it up instantly.”

How did you go digital? Now you can take the best of Sunset with you to the garden center, nursery and your yard. You can get the free mobile edition of this book’s Plant Finder on your smartphone. (Search for Sunset Plant Finder.) With it, you can access more than 2,000 plants — and search by plant name, ZIP Code, climate zone, sun and water requirements, and type. There’s a companion online Plant Finder that lets you browse by color, height, spread and special needs.

How else is the book interactive? The last section of “The New Sunset Western Garden Book” is a practical guide. We’ve added a camera icon on the bottom of the pages, pointing you to corresponding videos on our website. It’s nice to read directions on planting a tomato in a pot and then watch a video of one of our editors showing you exactly how to do that.

What are the other major updates? This is the first edition to feature plant photos exclusively, rather than illustrations. There are more than 2,000 plant photos. We also updated the entire plant encyclopedia. That was the biggest job in the whole book. Every plant was reappraised, and we added many new varieties now available in nurseries. We went to growers all over the west and compared our existing plant database with what they are now offering; we asked what they thought we should include and why.

How many new plants did you add? The new book has 9,000 plants, up from 8,000 in the last edition. We also had to check the botany of every plant because botanists are constantly reclassifying plants.

What can new gardeners gain from the book? The section “Gardening Start to Finish” is more instinctive for the beginner. We walk them through the whole growing process from A to Z. We also have practical sections on gardening for wildlife and native plants, growing herbs and water-wise plants.

What can more experienced gardeners gain from the new book? The plant encyclopedia is filled with tip boxes of additional information – like how to propagate a sweet potato vine or when to cut ornamental grasses for the vase.

You have more edibles, don’t you? We asked ourselves: “What do people want most from ‘The New Sunset Western Garden Book’ right now? You’d have to be totally checked out not to notice a huge wave of edible gardening, so we wanted to amp up our coverage. I’m really happy with the “what edibles to plant when” charts for warm-season and cool-season veggies.

What’s your favorite take-away from the book? There’s an underlying theme that acknowledges how we garden now – with an interest in natural gardening and sustainability. Our gardens are smaller, but they’re stylish and sustainable.

Note: A version of this Q&A appeared in the LA Times HOME blog on February 17th.

In planning the hands-on workshop with education director Joy Ijams, I worried that late February in Dallas could present some challenges. That is, when it came to procuring local and seasonal design ingredients. Fortunately for the 20 folks who participated in our sold-out class, my fears were allayed.

For the success of our event, I have several awesome people to acknowledge. First of all, thanks goes to Joy – the ever-upbeat program planner who invited me to speak about The 50 Mile Bouquet in a morning lecture and then to teach what she called a “make and take” workshop after our lunch break.

Joy, along with her education department colleagues and volunteers, made everything run smoothly. Our students were happy and engaged – and all the AV systems worked to perfection.

The following morning, prior to the arrival of those attending the 10 AM lecture, Joy and I headed out to the Arboretum’s display gardens with Felcos in hand. We were motivated by a concern that we wouldn’t have enough greenery otherwise. Sorry, Jimmy, but we harvested from the fringes of your borders, including clipping from the back sides of Indian hawthorn, just-blooming forsythia, phlomis, and rosemary. Oh, and a few minor branches from a saucer magnolia. 

Cynthia agreed to harvest everything she had on hand and bring it to our class. Yes, it’s still early spring on Cynthia’s rather young flower farm, but you’d never know it by the fabulous, overflowing galvanized French flower buckets she delivered.

They contained an awesome mix of spring bulbs (several daffodil varieties); uncommon foliage (cardoons, hoar hound, and other green boughs); and lots of flowering fruit-tree branches. I’m so pleased that Cynthia joined us.

Once all our ingredients were assembled, I started out the class by discussing my favorite “green” floral design techniques:

• Use a recycled or repurposed vase
• Stabilize stems with organic or re-usable material, such as an armature of branches or twigs, wood aspen (Excelsior), old-fashioned flower frogs, chicken wire and a foliage nest.
• Strip all foliage from the portion of the stem that will be under water; fresh-cut ever stem and plan on refreshing the water every day or two.

The students exceeded their own expectations with a beautiful lineup of designs. You can see some of their examples here.

Bottom line: Gardeners are ideal floral designers. We know the form, habit, bloom time and character of the ingredients in our gardens. And so we know how and when to harvest those ingredients — and arrange them in companionable displays in a vase. Perhaps this is an unscientific, alternative approach to floral design. But it makes sense to me! When you use seasonal ingredients, then they will naturally look like they belong together in a vase.

Here’s a lovely gallery of the local-seasonal-sustainable designs that filled our vases:

 Bess Wyrick, Celadon & Celery

We headed up to midtown to a restaurant called Rouge Tomate, a 2-star Michelin establishment known for its modern, organic fare. Celadon & Celery is responsible for designing weekly arrangements for the hostess station, the main dining room and the downstairs private dining room. Because of the restaurant’s organic menu and reputation for serving local ingredients, it makes sense that the owners of Rouge Tomate want their flowers to echo similar values.

The restaurant’s credo: “At Rouge Tomate, we give preference to local and seasonal products, including fruit and vegetables grown on farms that respect the environment; choose fish depending on their stock and impact on ecosystems; select meat and poultry from farmers that feed their animals with local plants; highlight quality wines grown by viticulturists who follow organic or biodynamic principles.”

Before I arrived, Bess’s driver had delivered the other flowers she needed. Those ingredients included the longest and most slender gladiolas I had ever seen. In pale green, the blooms were clearly hothouse grown, but they weren’t imported. Along with the glads, Bess had requested yummy bunches of winter anemones in the deepest plum hue, with dark black centers. She also sourced quirky purple artichokes on stems. All of these ingredients came from greenhouses in Florida, whereas the kiwi and pussy willow branches came from local farms on Long Island.

Bess’s arrangement for the main dining room was simple yet completely sophisticated. She first filled a tall, square container with the kiwi branches, using them to create a tree-like structure that soared above dining tables. Bess arranged the glads in and among the kiwi, using that fresh promise of spring green against the earthy kiwi bark to make a thoroughly organic statement.

After finishing her design work, Bess still had cleanup duties. She brings biodegradable garbage bags with her when she designs on location. All the cuttings and trimmings get tossed in the giant bags, which are then placed with the restaurant’s kitchen compost. Any cardboard goes into the recycling, leaving zero waste on site.

This weekly ritual is one that keeps Bess in close contact with the restaurant management and kitchen staff. As a result, when weddings and private events are booked into Rouge Tomate, it’s a given that Celadon & Celery is called in to design eco-friendly flowers for the clients.

Metallic, pewter, and snowy white - the non-floral arrangement

Choosing the appropriate vase for an arrangement is like finding the right pair of shoes to compliment your cocktail dress, right? There’s good, better and best. A critical eye is required to make the right choice!

Today, not able to decide which vase to use for my New Year’s arrangement, I photographed my silvery-winter ingredients in three different vases. Please vote for your fav!

The ingredients:

• Pussy willow from J. Foss Garden Flowers in Chehalis, Washington (grower Janet Foss tells me the cultivar of her unique, multi-branched form of pussy willow is unknown; she took cuttings from a customer’s garden and began propagating them). The stems are truly stunning and way more interesting that your typical ramrod-straight pussy willow branch
• Two forms of Dusty Miller (Centaurea cineraria) — lacy and broad, grown by Charles Little & Co. of Eugene, Oregon
• Plus, a few sprigs of feathery Artemisia arborescens from my garden.

We’re all a little tired of evergreens and red berries, right? That was my thinking when I came up with a metallic, pewtery vibe, which seems fitting for the New Year.

Option 1: Stripes of bronze, brass and pewter embellish this substantial urn, inherited from my father-in-law. It’s the only shiny-metallic vessel I own.

Option One

 Option 2: Basic white. Going for the simple statement. The foliage definitely looks snowier against this glazed vase.

Option Two

 Option 3: More textures, this time in a ginger jar with a raised, circular pattern. Its color is arguably mauve or pale lilac. Or maybe gray with a tinge of purple.

Option Three

Please vote in the comment section – and tell me WHY you prefer a particular vase for this combination!

Last year I blogged about finding a set of half-circle shutters at a vintage sale. I wanted to emulate my friend Baylor Chapman’s succulent-planted shutters that grace her outdoor terrace in San Francisco. Since then, a few folks have emailed to ask if I EVER finished that project? Much to my embarrassment, those dusty shutters sat in the garage, untouched for nearly a year!

But finally, now that we’ve settled into a permanent residence, I’ve been able to work on this project. The shutters have been cleaned and given three coats of exterior paint. To turn them into vertical succulent planters I mounted both pieces with wood screws outside my office windows and then stuffed the openings betweeen each slat with sedums and sempervivums. Let’s see how they look:

Step one: Paint the shutters. I used semigloss acrylic berry-red, the paint used for my home's exterior trim

Step Two: Staple landscaping cloth to the back of both shutters.

Step Three: Mount shutter and fill the "slots" with potting soil.

Step Four: Plant with hardy sedums and other succulents.

Here’s a photo of my dining room wall, where I’ve organized a medley of rounded objects, mostly plates and one vintage mirror that I inherited as a girl in the 1960s:

1. Round gold-framed mirror, given to my parents and migrated to my possession since the 1960s.
2. Dark purple pottery plate, a gift from my college roommate and her former girlfriend.
3. Celadon plate, imprinted with a real lotus leaf, gift from same college roommate, who purchased it for me when we visited Lotusland.
4. Red-and-teal platter, a gift from the owner of Fireworks Gallery, years ago, as a thank you after I wrote a story about her Pioneer Square shop.
5. Another wonderful celadon plate, a gift from my friends Kathleen Brown and Sara Anderson when they visited us from DC years ago.
6. Teal, white and purple platter, hand-formed and painted by the Berkeley artist Keeyla Meadows. I purchased it from her on a visit to her garden in 2008.
7. Tiny vintage Majolica plate, purchased from an antique shop in Madison Park.

Let’s just say the men in my household were less than excited to see this installation. The day after I created my plate-platter vignette, my spouse left for work, saying: Please do NOT hammer any more nails into the wall today!

So the following weekend, we were in Chicago visiting our college-aged son for family weekend. We had breakfast at a cool neighborhood spot and what do you think I noticed on the wall there?! Check it out: