Tasmanian Waratah Wedding in November

It's such a thrill to be part of someones special wedding day - I love doing flowers for weddings!  Erica's wedding was in November and in Tasmania that can be a tricky time for weather.  It was obviously not the case on that particular day!  What a wonderful spot for a wedding.

I "met" Erica internet style.  She was a customer in my trees4thewood online store and discovered my flower farming activities online.   Having worked on the Overland Track, a world famous bush walking track through spectacular Tasmanian wilderness, she was keen to use Tasmanian Waratahs for the main flower in her wedding bouquet.  These gorgeous flowers grow wild in areas along the track and you can't miss them when they are in flower.  

I was excited to be asked to provide her flowers and had a ball creating something to show off the Tasmanian Waratah.  As you can see, the colours she chose for the wedding are really styled around the waratah.  Ivory, grey and red are a classic combination.

What a fabulous day for a beach wedding!  The colour of that sea is just spectacular.  And I think it really makes that gorgeous red just glow.  The brides and bridesmaid's bouquets use Tasmanian Waratah, Safari Sunset Leucadendron, Berzelia (Button Bush), Agonis Flexuosa foliage and Eucalyptus foliage.  We decided to remove the waratah's leaves so as not to have too much green in the bouquet.  At that time of year, red and green can look a little christmassy.

Mini bouquet for a 3 year old flower girl! Cute!! And what a handsome little guy too.

The grooms boutonniere or button hole - Berzelia (Button Bush), Waratah, Leucadendron and Agonis Flexuosa foliage.

Thanks so much for letting me be part of your day, Erica!  It looks like it was a very memorable and happy one.

Thinking About Weddings - Boutonniere

 Boutonniere is a french word meaning 'button hole' and is the name for a flower or small bouquet worn on the lapel of a man's jacket.  Boutonniere have an interesting history, with some suggesting the practice started with flowers being worn by men going into battle.  The boutonniere was very popular in Victorian times. Suits were made with a special opening and loop on the lapel so as to accommodate a flower, usually a carnation.  More recently, the boutonniere has become something worn only on special occasions.  The button hole on the lapel has almost disappeared from modern suits and the boutonniere has evolved into a single flower or small bouquet that is wired, taped and pinned to the left jacket lapel.

Natives are brilliant flowers for weddings, and in the case of boutonniere they really shine.  If natives are well prepared,  they can last really well removing worry about wilting which can be a problem for boutonnieres.  With an increasing focus on locally and sustainably grown seasonal produce, native flowers are becoming much more popular as wedding flowers.

I've spent a lot of time on the internet, trawling through wedding blogs and sites and found there was a lack of inspiring native boutonniere collections, so I thought I'd make one!  Some of these are my own work, and some are ideas that I've found on my "travels".  I hope you find some inspiration here.

These buttonholes feature the intensely coloured Tasmanian Waratah.  A November wedding was perfect as these natives are at their best in late spring.  The bride themed her wedding colours around these beautiful Tassie blooms with ivory, red and grey.  The grooms buttonhole stands out using a larger specimen and adding a red leucadendron.  The foliage is Agonis Flexuosa and the white Berzelia or Button Bush adds the gorgeous ivory highlight to make these bouttoniere really special.   

Dryandra are an Australian native from the protea family.  They are wonderful long lasting flowers with leaves that have a lovely texture and growth habit.  This early spring boutonniere utilises the Dryandra Formosa flower and highlights the zig zag foliage.  The golden Dryandra is teamed with early season Berzelia or Button Bush, still fresh green before the white flowers emerge, and a glossy gum leaf.  

This groom's boutonniere was from a January wedding with an Australian Native theme.  A large gum nut foraged in spring and dried with the seeds removed is the main "flower".  It is teamed with a Leucadendron Pisa, picked late so its central cone glows silvery green.  Some Berzelia Button Bush adds creamy white.  The background foliage is the lovely Nothofagus Cunninghamii or Myrtle - glossy green dainty leaves bely the sturdiness of this fabulous foliage.  There is also a Leucadendron Christmas Cone giving a touch of red.

A summer boutonniere using an orange Grevillea flower and foliage, teamed with some cyprus foliage. The addition of dried summer grasses adds texture for a rustic, country wedding.  

Pinterest

This larger style boutonniere uses the ever popular Safari Sunset Leucadendron and teams it with some lovely textured foliage.  I love the colour of the leucadendron against the suit fabric.  The green really makes it pop.

Polkadot Bride

These gorgeous boutonniere are fun and light.  They use Leucadendron Pisa, Flannel Flowers and Serruria or Blushing Bride, and team them with some light native foliage.  The two attendants buttonholes are smaller and utilise one main flower.  The grooms buttonhole is distinguished by being larger, and incorporating all of the blooms used.  This is a great way of getting variety and making sure the most important boutonniere stands out.

Pinterest

I love this buttonhole using eucalyptus buds with feathers.  I think they work really well with the fabric of the suit.  The colour of the twine used to wrap the stems really makes the buttonhole work too.

Lost In Fibre

These boutonniere are a great example of how "mismatched" can really work!  They are all different, but the rustic, textured style ties them all together.  As long as the groom stands out in the crowd, theres no reason why all the buttonholes need to be the same.

These late summer boutonniere are "mismatched" again.  Working on a theme using pink and orange they use lots of different natives.  They are tied together by the common use of twine and the foliage - zig zag Banksia foliage and cyprus.  Some of the flowers used are Geraldton Wax, Grevillea, Kangaroo Paw, Boronia, Summer Grass, and dried Leucadendron Cones.  

This is the grooms boutonniere from the same wedding as the picture above.  It uses a selection of the other flowers but adds Brunia, tying it in with the brides bouquet.  It is also bigger overall, making sure the groom is the star of the show!

Hopefully, you've found some inspiration for a native flower wedding here.
For more boutonniere ideas, see my Swallows Nest Farm Pinterest board or the Martha Stewart Weddings list of Boutonniere. 

Fabulous Foliage

Grevillea foliage

One of my favourite things about floral design is the foliage.  I know, the flowers are the main event, and I grow them so, well, they're important!  But foliage is the "spice" of an arrangement.  It can make or break a gorgeous bunch of flowers.  Not to mention the incredible colours and textures of foliage! So I love foliage ...  I love the foraging, the discovery of a new bush or tree that has fresh new growth just begging to be picked and admired.  I love the colours - think of the purplish blues of some new eucalyptus growth, or the incredible teal blues of some of the conifers and junipers.  Rich burgundy, pale yellow, silver, soft green, dark rich green - oh the possibilities!  And I love the textures - soft and silky, feathery, wide and structured, spiky, curly, neat, unruly!  

Its the variety that appeals.  Foliage is not just "greenery".  It can be so much more.  Some of our australian natives produce some spectacular foliage.  Grevilleas often have amazing leaves, and are often on sturdy long stems.  I use grevilleas growing around my home to provide the structure for a bouquet.  I have some maroon and orange flowering hybrids the have wonderfully shaped leaves.  As a bonus, they often have a flower or two on each stem, adding more colour.  Look for leaves that have new growth that's firm, not floppy.  Pick them as long as you can, following the stem back into the bush to find where it joins onto the branch.  Put them in water soon after you pick them and they'll stay fresh for weeks.  (You'll know if you've picked too soon - the smaller leaves at the end of the stems will wilt.)

Sometimes, when foraging for foliage, you need to be selective about stems that have insect damage.  I personally don't mind a little bit of damage - I think it adds charm.  But on the whole, it's good to select the stems with the cleanest, freshest leaves.  Putting foliage in a vase or arrangement shines a spotlight on it.  It comes under more scrutiny than it would on a bush or tree.  It's easier to make the selections out in the bush and leave the damaged leaves to the insects and wildlife that clearly love it too!

Banksia Grandis

These Banksia Grandis leaves are just spectacular, aren't they!  They are quite large - around 30 cm long and 5 cm wide, and deeply zig-zagged.  There are a number of Banksias that have leaves like this, but varying in size.  Speciosa has long slender zig-zags.  Banksia Baxterii has less curled and scaled down versions of these incredible shapes.  And Banksia Brownii has long, fine zig zags.  They're incredible to use in an arrangement.

Banksia Speciosa

Even grasses can be used as foliage.  At this time of year with grasses full of summer growth and setting seed, they can be really gorgeous in an arrangement.  I love driving along country roads in summer and seeing the incredible variety of colours and textures just in the roadside grasses.  Purple, yellow, pink, white - and all manner of shapes and textures.  

I have a number of favourite foraging spots on my property.  One of them is at the top of a steep rise where you can glimpse the town, the bay and the little local islands through the incredibly tall eucalypts that have been untouched for 50 years.  In the undergrowth on the edge of the bush there are some fabulous native plants growing.  One I discovered not long after we moved here, really caught my eye.  I looked it up and found that it was actually sold as foliage for the export market!  And here it was growing wild in the bush.  It's called Pimelea Nivea.  

Pimelea Nivea

My "Plants of Tasmania" book tells me it's common name is Bushman's Bootlace.  I found out why it got this name the first time I tried to pick it.  The bark or outer coating of the stem is incredibly strong and fibrous, and when you try to snap a branch the bark won't break, instead coming off in long, seemingly unbreakable strips. Next time I used my shears!  The leaves are small and richly green and glossy.  The growth habit of the plant is long and slender, with lots of long upright branches covered in the green leaves.

Underneath, the leaves and stem are white and softly sueded.  The contrast is really charming.  Pimelea Nivea also has lovely flowers in spring and summer.  Clusters of dainty white flowers appear on the very ends of the stems.  I love using this foraged foliage whether its in flower or not.  And the adventure of picking it in the "wild" adds to my enjoyment of it!

This is a recent vase of flowers I made for my house, using entirely foraged foliage and a few of my summer pincushions.  It was such fun to combine the colours and textures of the foliage, and highlight them with the simple orange pincushions.  

I couldn't do a blog post about foliage without making a special mention of eucalyptus foliage.  Our own australian gums provide some of the world's most popular foliages.  Again, the variety of colour, texture and shape is almost dizzying.  Some eucalyptus foliage has that incredible silvery white bloom that, combined with the colour of the leaves underneath produces some spectacular colour effects.  This basket above is filled with foliage from a medium sized gum behind my house.  People often ask, "what is that flowering tree?" when they see it from a distance  The foliage is almost iridescent, glowing purple.  I'm not sure of the type gum, but I find myself coming back to it again and again for inspiration.  Silver dollar is one of the most well known eucalypts sold as foliage.  But considering we are surrounded by them, why not experiment!  Have a look in your back yard and see what you can create!

What's In the Basket

A bit different to the usual "what's in the basket" post - I had a bit of fun foraging in the bush this weekend.  Our property has a significant portion of bush which hasn't been touched since the 1960s.  There are some fabulous local plants growing in the understory and one in particular that I love to pick in season.  It's commonly called Bushman's Bootlace but has the proper name of Pimelea Nivea.  It has gorgeous little glossy deep green leaves with white 'suede' on the underside.  The stems are long and slender and the leaves are neatly arranged all along the stems.  In spring and summer, little clusters of white flowers emerge on the tips of the stems.  Great as a foliage plant and also in flower, I have used this often since I first found it growing wild on the edge of a steep wooded hill.  I went up in search of some on the weekend and come home with an entire basket of foliage ranging from the small leaves of the Bushman's Bootlace to extra large blue grey eucalyptus foliage - leaves bigger than my hand!  I found some lovely banksia foliage, she oak, ozothamnus just coming to the end of its flowering time, and some fresh Blanket Bush foliage.  Such fun!

Simple fresh foliage can be so beautiful in a vase.  I'm planning on having some fun with it in the near future!

Reflecting and Dreaming - New Years Activities

The New Year is here, and with it the sense of needing to reflect, take stock and make plans for the coming 12 months.  With hardly time to take a breath over the festive season, I'm feeling like a good holiday is in order.  But in snatched moments of quiet here and there, I'm thinking about what 2013 brought us and of course, what's to be done next ... dreaming of possibilities and new ideas.

This time last year, we were returning home after a major bushfire event in our community in southern Tasmania.  Things were blackened, charred, smokey and dry.  What a difference a year makes!  This summer has been much cooler and wetter than last year.  We have green grass, and the plants are flourishing.  In the bushfire affected areas new growth and new buildings are beginning to be the norm.  Time heals.  2013 was a busy, eventful year full of extremes.  It was also a productive year in so many ways.  I wonder what 2014 will bring!

One of my dreams for the year is to try this planting some varieties of Kangaroo Paw.  I just love them at the moment!  I have some beautiful maroon ones, a really special pink one and a white one that I'm enjoying in the garden outside my kitchen window.  On the list of "things I'd like to do" in 2014 is give some serious thought to what varieties I might try, and then finding the perfect spot for them on the farm.  Here's hoping the local wildlife don't fancy them for dinner!  

We've had house guests for a month over the Christmas and New Year period.  My mum and dad, both in their 80s, came to spend the festive season with us.  My dad is keen on anything to do with wood, so he's been in the thick of things as we've been working on the the flower shed we started in July.  

We're close to completing the shed, and I'm really excited about the possibilities that having a lovely flower space is going to provide.  It's so exciting to be able to have a dream and then see it become a reality!  It may just be a simple wooden shed but it's so special to us.  I'll do a post of the shed build when we're finished it, but in the meantime this picture is a really special one of my 86 year old dad helping out with the build. 

There are some other exciting things happening around the farm too.  We're busy clearing and tidying and making the place look its best in readiness for an article featuring us in a national magazine!  In two weeks the photographer is coming, and there's so much to be done.  Mowing, pruning, cleaning, tidying ....  its all very exciting!  After the rush of Christmas, its good to have the motivation to really give the place a tidy-up.  I've been cleaning the cool room, washing buckets, and making the current flower shed a little more organised.  Great things to do at the start of a new year.

My mum has always been a keen gardener.  And my dad tells me that his mum was also a cut flower grower.  She grew flowers for sale in Sydney in the 1930's and 40's.  She had a little plot where she grew chrysanthemums in time for mothers day.  It's amazing how things tend to run in families - I only found out about my grandmother's flowers recently.  The females in both sides of my family have contributed to my passion for growing flowers!  My mum can't walk well anymore, but she was wanted to see how the flowers were growing - we took her up the hill to the farm in the ute and showed her the sites.  Showing someone around the farm really helps you to see it through another's eyes.  It's a special place!

I have really enjoyed the weddings we've done recently, and one of my dreams for 2014 is to document the weddings better, and feature them here on the blog.  

And of course, there will be more planting!  With so many varieties of fabulous proteas and natives, its not possible to stop at just a few.  

I have some baby Brunia Albiflora ready to plant out when the wet weather comes. (My 2 year old  loves to help give them a drink!)   And I'm on the lookout for more varieties of protea.  I'd love some Coronata - gorgeous apple green with fringing.  Then theres the Magnifica or the Queen Protea - really large and with ridiculous amounts of fringing!  I'd also love to plant some more foliage plants.  Foliage is such an important part of arranging flowers - its not just a few green leafy stems as you might suppose.  Colour, texture, shape and pattern are all things that foliage can add, and the right foliage can really make the difference between an average arrangement and a spectacular one.  So many ideas!

You never really know what a year will bring, and often the plans we make for a year don't come to pass for many reasons.  But its still good to make plans.  Its good to dream, to have ideas and work to make them a reality - its what life's all about.  We're looking forward to 2014 and all that it brings - hope you are too!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Can you believe we are saying goodbye to 2013?  The year seems to have flown by so fast and the Christmas Season has been so busy that I have hardly come up for air!  In Tasmania the long summer days linger and the summer solstice occurs just before Christmas.  It's a lovely time of year.  

The main flower we're harvesting now is the Leucospermum, commonly known as a Pincushion.  Its beautiful summer colours provide inspiration for me when it comes to festive decorations.  I love fresh Christmas wreaths.  They make great table centrepieces, especially with a candle in the middle.  

I love the challenge of combining colours and textures to create these wreaths.  Foliage plays a big part in the overall feel of the wreath and its fun foraging around the farm for beautiful fresh foliage to use.

I love the wreath above using some late Tasmanian Waratah and button bush or Berzelia.  I've also used some Dryandra Formosa, an Australian flower from the protea family that I did a test plant of a few years ago.  The golden flowers are surrounded by lovely foliage that looks like strips of green zig zag.  Dryandra flowers dry well too and last for years in a dried arrangement.

During spring I noticed a wonderful eucalypt in my local area that was laden with gum nuts.  So heavily laden was it that the branches were weighed down to the ground.  I snipped a few branches and dried them, looking forward to when I could use them.  They were a perfect addition to this wreath, I thought!

Orange Leucospermums and yellow Leucadendron Pisa make this wreath really summery and fresh.  The Pisa can be used at various stages.  I picked some quite early to use it in its flowering stage.  Later the central cone enlarges.   It is silvery green and beautifully surround by yellow and lime green bracts.  

Geraldton Wax flowers and Leucadendron Jubilee Crown, also known as Christmas Cones fill out the bright citrusy wreath.  I couldn't resist adding some more gum nuts!

Foraging around the farm lead me to seek out a small holly bush that had been overgrown in the last two years.  After a bit of bush-bashing, accompanied by my trusty sidekick, I found the bush and was delighted to discover that it had grown significantly, even though it had been almost hidden by bushy growth.  Needless to say I've now cleared around it.  The holly was fun to play with in wreaths and Christmas bunches too, although it was a little prickly to deal with. 

I also found, during one of my foraging walks, some impressive cones on a big conifer our family imaginatively calls the Christmas Tree!  When I first started doing the local farmer's market I was excited to use some foliage I found which had pink immature cones on it.  These are the same cones a couple of months later.  I really don't remember this tree producing such impressive cones before! The photo doesn't do them justice - they are shiny and deep purple.  Wonderful for an addition to a Christmas wreath!!

I saved them for my own Christmas wreath.  I added Leucaspermum Scarlet Ribbons, some wild foraged Ozothamnus (white Rice Flower)  Tasmanian Myrtle foliage, Leucadendron Safari Sunset, Christmas Cones, and Goldstrike, and of course, some of the gum nuts.  Knowing it was my own wreath I probably tried to pack too many things onto the one wreath, but I'm glad I made the time to make a wreath for our own table.

It was a beautiful summer day in Tasmania on December 25th.  We had Christmas brunch on the deck in the open air.

It was a memorable day.  As I write this, the wreath is still relatively fresh and sitting on the table beside me.  I love to enjoy the flowers I grow in my own home!

I'm looking forward to 2014 - it promises to be a very exciting year.  In the meantime, we are still working to pick the rest of the summer crops as they bloom.  I'm looking forward to doing some wedding flowers this week, and then maybe getting a short break toward the end of January before the year really begins in earnest.  I hope 2014 is happy one for you - enjoy!!

Farewell until next year.

What's in the Basket

Spring went by in a flash here.  And just as summer arrived, so did the pincushions or Leucospermums.  I love these beautiful flowers from the protea family for the range of cheery summer colours that they offer.  In the basket this week was the first real harvest of some newly planted pincushions called Leucospermum Scarlet Ribbons.  The plants are not quite 3 years old and are starting to flower really well now.  It looks like summer in a basket to me!

The Scarlet Ribbons start off with a slightly pink/purple tinge due to the hairs on the sheaf that contains the "pin".  As the pins emerge the overall colour impression changes.  The spines are a salmon pink and the sheaths curl to reveal a scarlet interior.  Then as the flower ages, it becomes more intensely red.

I love the summery colours of pincushions.  There are 3 varieties in this shot of my picking trailer.  Don't they remind you of gelato flavours?  Raspberry, mango and tangerine!