July. Hydrangeas. Boom.

What a week. Our last to enjoy the home and garden we’ve occupied for the past four years. Downsizing is wonderfully aspirational, but boy is it a lot of work. In fact, I’m rushing to post this because the Garden Lovers’ Garage Sale resumes in 1-1/2 hours!

But with only 72 hours left before closing on the sale of our nearly 3,500-square-foot home and moving into a not quite 1,200-square-foot apartment (still in Seattle), I had to take a Slow Flowers Challenge “moment” yesterday.

The cause for my joy? These amazing hydrangeas! I inherited numerous hydrangeas from this home and garden’s previous owners, more than a half-dozen. In one shaded corner beneath the fir and cedar trees, there is a trio clustered between the fence and the driveway. Occasional irrigation; otherwise much neglect.

Still, they are glorious come summertime. Look at these iridescent hues ranging from powder blue to French blue to rosy purple. These flowers do not disappoint – even when there are piles of garage sale junk strewn at their feet.

Ready to be carried to my new home in this amazing steel floral caddy, complete with six jars of hydrangeas.

PS, don’t you LOVE this metal carrier? It was designed and custom fabricated by Silver Lake Farms, the urban flower farm based in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood, owned by flower maven Tara Kolla. You can read about Tara in a chapter of my book The 50 Mile Bouquet – and at her beautiful web site here.

Tara designed these carriers so she and her crew can harvest flowers, pop them into the jars of water, and bring them to their various sales outlets. One of the most popular is Hollywood Farmers’ Market, where you can find Silver Lake Farms every Sunday, February through July. You can also join Silver Lake’s FLOWER CSA for custom-picked beauties – straight from Tara’s urban growing fields. And, you might get lucky and be able to purchase a carrier. It’s a perfect tool for gardeners and flower farmers alike!

Here’s to a cool, pastel-themed July 4th!

I’ve been preoccupied with thoughts of Patriotism this week, especially with the Slow Flowers launch of American Flowers Week, which runs through today – July 4th.

A sampling of the posts on Instagram and Twitter – all for #americanflowersweek

Hundreds of folks have joined me in making red-white-and-blue floral arrangements and posting photos of their fields, flowers, bouquets and arrangements across the social media spectrum, all tagged with #americanflowersweek.

I’ve had a lot of fun making red-white-and-blue bouquets this week, too!

So, for a softer take on #americanflowersweek, may I present floral patriotism with pastels?

Peach, white and blue!

That nigella ~ so divine! Grown by Vivian Larson of Everyday Flowers.

I love the distressed quality of this white cast-iron planter, recycled from a Better Homes & Gardens photo shoot from a few years back.

With a plastic liner converting it to a vase, the urn fits right into this week’s restful floral palette. P.S., I used a small flower frog, secured inside – for stabilizing the stems.

From my garden:

• Dusty Miller foliage ~ intensely white at this time of year

From Seattle Wholesale Growers Market:

• Pale peach foxgloves from Triple Wren Farms
• Astilbe from Ojeda Farms (purchased fresh last week, but preserved as a dry element)
• Globe thistle (Echinops sp.) and raspberry foliage from Jello Mold Farm
• Nigella ‘Black Cumin’ and double Shasta Daisies from Everyday Flowers

A red-white-and-blue, All-American bouquet! (c) Tim Gleason

Floral Fireworks for July 4th (c) Tim Gleason

Happy Independence Day!

We have so many opportunities to celebrate local, seasonal and beautiful flowers and there’s no better one than welcoming Week 25 of the  Slow Flowers Challenge which coincides with the July 4th holiday.

Join me in clipping and arranging red-white-and-blue botanicals to honor the holiday.

I am so excited that all of the flowers in this week’s stellar arrangement came from one of my favorite flower farms,Charles Little & Co. of Eugene, Oregon. I visited this past week and received permission from Bethany Little to harvest to my heart’s content. Thank you, Bethany!

Tomorrow begins the inaugural American Flowers Weekcampaign, a tribute to the farmers who grow flowers in all 50 states, and to the artisans who interpret those flowers in bouquets, arrangements and other botanical beauty.

You are invited to take part in American Flowers Week by posting the flowers you grow and arrange on all social platforms with the hash-tag #americanflowersweek.

Learn more and download this lovely logo by clicking here.

Here are a few more details about this week’s bouquet:

A profusion of red, white and blue annuals and perennials for July 4th (c) Tim Gleason

White flowers:

• Variegated green-white sedum as foliage (which you can barely see!)
• Centranthus
• Queen Anne’s lace
• Nigella
• Double-white Yarrow (Achillea ptarmica ‘Angel’s Breath’)
• Obedient Plant (Psysostegia virginiana)

Blue flowers:

• Delphinium – pale and dark blue
• Scabiosa
• Cornflower/Bachelor’s Button (Centaurea cyanus)
• Sea Holly (Eryngium sp.)

Red flowers:

• Crocosmia
• Geum

 

Please enjoy this  Snapshot of an All-American flower farm:

Charles Little & Co., Eugene, Oregon:

Flower farmer Bethany Little, of Charles Little & Co.

At the foot of Mount Pisgah in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Flower farming is hard work, but this daily view makes it worth it!

Farmhouse (left) and Flower Barn (right) at Charles Little & Co.

Farmstand Sign offers American-grown Lovelies and more!

A garden-sourced Father’s Day bouquet for my husband, Bruce

A bucket filled with lovelies from my garden.

Greetings and here’s to SUMMER’S arrival today, June 21st! I couldn’t be more inspired to celebrate the Solstice than to take a walk in the garden. I clipped each stem for today’s Slow Flowers Challenge from my Seattle yard this morning and spent a glorious (and blissfully meditative) hour or so arranging.

And since it’s Father’s Day, I’m using the arrangement for tonight’s dinner we’re preparing for Bruce, my husband and the father of our two boys.

I’ve always loved pairing lime and wine colors together, in garden borders and beds, as well as in container gardens. No surprise that the deep burgundy Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius ‘Diabolo’) looks terrific with the acid green Lady’s Mantle ( Alchemilla mollis). Stems from those two create the textural and high-contrast foundation for this design.

Steps one and two: Insert foliage to create the foundation.

By the way, this is a vintage Haeger American-made vessel, a creamy ivory piece that I brought home with me from a trip to Iowa a few years ago. I love the proportions – perfect for a centerpiece. (Here’s a similar one on Etsy  – they’re not too difficult to find.)

To create this design, I placed a large cage-style metal flower frog (also vintage) in the bottom of the bowl. The grid has 5/8-inch openings, ideal for a combination of woody and herbaceous stems as I’m using here.

Steps three and four: Adding garden roses, a sweet pairing of a peachy-pink rose with a bicolored white-ruby rose. I inherited these two unknown roses when we moved to this garden four years ago.

After I added the roses, I wanted to take advantage of some wispy pieces to bring a playful dimension to the design. I incorporated a beautiful, mauve-colored Astrantia and several stems of a burgundy-petaled tickseed with great yellow centers ( Coreopsis sp.).

Steps five and six: Astrantia and Coreopsis for their wispy textures.

Two final and rather unexpected touches utilize other garden stalwarts: Crocosmia in bud – love the strong lines of it at this stage; and bronze fennel. Now some may argue that bronze fennel is a garden thug, and it is. But the flouncy, lacy texture is pretty fantastic in an arrangement, so I always allow a few stems of it to remain after weeding out the volunteers.

Steps seven and eight: Crocosmia buds and bronze fennel stems.

Sea holly (Eryngium sp.) looking dazzling!

This week’s arrangement comes to you courtesy of a special event in which I participated to benefit the King County Library Foundation.

Called an “Author Salon,” the private gathering was one of several offered at the Library Foundation’s recent annual Literary Lions Auction. Library supporters  Elaine & John Hogle  and  Felicia Dixon & Lucas Hoban  hosted the Author Salon last weekend at theBellevue Botanical Garden – one of my very favorite public gardens in the Seattle area. Landscape architect Liz Browning of Swift Company also participated by leading a tour of the newest garden BBG installations area designed by her firm.

The Author Salon team, standing, from left: Felicia, Liz and Elaine; I’m seated in front.

What a beautiful venue! I was asked to talk about Slow Flowers, the book, as well as the slow flowers movement to source domestic and local flowers rather than rely on imports.

Local flowers and the Slow Flowers book go together well!

My publisher, St. Lynn’s Press, generously donated copies of Slow Flowers so that everyone in attendance took home a signed copy. And all the proceeds of the afternoon benefit the King County Library Foundation. Cindy Sharek and Andrea Quigley of the Foundation ensured that we had a lovely reception to hear the message of supporting literacy education!

And about the flowers you see here. I asked – and received special permission – to cut from the famed Perennial Border at the Bellevue Botanical Garden for my demonstration.

While you might think I focused on which blooms to choose first, it was the oak leaf hydrangea that caught my attention before anything else.

My vase had a fairly wide opening of about 7 inches, so I needed larger, structural branches and leaves as my design’s starting point. Plus, I absolutely love the hydrangea’s stage right now. The leaves are large and supple and the flowers are still in bud so they’re the same color green and the foliage.

Susy Hutchison took home the Slow Flowers bouquet.

See my entire plant list below. As I was basically designing on the fly, (I only clipped the blooms 30 minutes before the event!), it occurred to me that I had three primary hues and three secondary hues of blooms — and naturally, that gave me an organizing structure to discuss a bit of color theory.

I had a few longtime friends in the audience who surprised me by attending, people I hadn’t seen for years!

How cool that my friend Susy Hutchison, former news anchor for KIRO-TV (CBS affiliate) won the doorprize to take home my arrangement. Seriously, it was not a fix!

Susy reported to me that the bouquet was “still going strong,” one week after she brought it home. Yes, folks, that’s another great reason for sourcing locally – your arrangement’s vase life will be extended!

The finished “color wheel” bouquet – clipped just steps away from our event.

Three sets of complements: Blue & Orange; Purple & Yellow; Red & Blue (with lots of green thrown in for good measure)

Three sets of complements: Blue & Orange; Purple & Yellow; Red & Blue (with lots of green thrown in for good measure)

Here’s that essential oak leaf foliage

Here is the recipe, with all ingredients from the Perennial Border at Bellevue Botanic Garden:

• Oak leaf hydrangea foliage & flowers (Hydrangea quercifolia)
• Lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis)
• Red/Maroon: Astilbe
• Green: Allium ‘Hair’ (a mutation of  A. sphaerocephalon)
• Orange: Geum (Geum chiloense) possibly ‘Totally Tangerine’
• Purple: Catmint (Nepeta sp.)
• Yellow: Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
• Blue: Sea holly (Eryngium amethystinum)
• Bonus stems: I added a few beautiful stems of pale orange and yellow foxglove

The lady’s mantle and oak leaf hydrangea blooms add a touch of lime.

A cool-toned combo for early June, including Acanthus mollis, baptisia, cerinthe and sweet peas – all offset with fragrant mint foliage.

Here’s how the entire bouquet turned out. I used a large trophy-like urn to accommodate the scale of the bear’s breech.

This week I couldn’t take my eyes off the gorgeous flower stalks of two bear’s breech plants ( Acanthus mollis) growing between our back porch and the pond in a shady area.

This perennial typically belongs at the back of the border where the large glossy foliage can offset smaller and more delicate companions. Deeply lobed, the acanthus leaf is a classical form in art and architecture. I’ve actually used the leaves in winter floral arrangements before. In my Zone 8b garden, the leaves are basically evergreen and winter hardy.

The blooms are also arresting. They are tall and pointed with an overall spiny form and purplish-green bracts. I will say this: They don’t LOVE being cut and plunked in a vase.

The five stalks I cut and used in this bouquet had mixed performance from between one to three days. So if you have bear’s breech in your perennial border, consider it a day-of cut flower.

‘April in Paris’ sweetpea, grown by Jello Mold Farm. If only you could inhale its perfume!

Baptisia (love the sweet pea-like flowers on the tall stem), with honeywort (Cerinthe).

Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis)

Curled just like a little shrimp, Cerinthe has a fabulous blue-green/purple flower

Here is the recipe::

• Garden mint, grown by Ojeda Farms in Ethel, Washington
• Honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’), grown by Jello Mold Farm in Mt. Vernon, Washington
• Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis), Jello Mold Farm
• ‘April in Paris’ Sweet Peas, Jello Mold Farm
• Bear’s breech (Acanthus mollis) flowers, from my garden

Everything came together beautifully, including the addition of the mint foliage!

Just for fun, here’s how the Acanthus mollis foliage lent much-needed drama to a December arrangement. I paired it with Callicarpa, curly willow and camellia foliage.

Note the large, glossy Acanthus foliage on the right side of this winter arrangement.

And on its own, the foliage of Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) is also fantastic. Long after the beautiful flowers fade, you can keep cutting the leaves for arranging:

Baptisia foliage in an August bouquet.

Some of Springtime’s most alluring flowering branches include: Magnolia, Dogwood, Apricot, Quince and Cherry.

We’re digging into the archives this week for the  Slow Flowers Challenge. That’s what happens when I find myself on too many airplanes, which is ironic, isn’t it? It’s sort of the opposite of my “Slow” aspirations!

However, I’m just back home from speaking and teaching in Orlando, Florida. And now, after recharging for the past five days in Seattle, I’ve re-packed and am heading to the airport tonight to fly to London!!!

That’s right! I’m off to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. I’ll also be meeting many of the people active in the British Flowers scene – U.K. flower farmers and florists who have many of the same objectives that we have here in the U.S. To put local, seasonal and sustainably-grown flowers at the center of our tables!

Stay tuned, because I promise that next week’s Slow Flowers Challenge will be decidedly British!

The acid green of variegated hostas and euphorbia create a “skirt” effect for flowering magnolia branches.

I absolutely love the images you see here. I created these arrangements for a national magazine story that was, sadly, never published. The editors, as they say, went in a different direction.

But my photos live on and I’m delighted to share them with you here.

The vase at left is filled with Pieris and Dogwood; the vase at right has both flowering Dogwod and twig dogwood.

Flowering Cherry with Snowball Viburnum.

Simple: Quince in two hues, plus swordfern.

Flowering plum, paired with Lamb’s Ear foliage.

Spring hellebores paired with flowering apricot branches.