Embracing the wonkiness of homegrown flowers
/Julia Atkinson-Dunn's first book, Petal Power, was a cheerleader for beginner gardeners dipping their toes into growing flowers at home. Flowers for Friends is a book about flower arranging, from the perspective of a gardener.
Here, Atkinson-Dunn talks us through her inspiration, and shares an extract from her new book about creating a floral display to bring in the new year.
Julia Atkinson Dunn: As my passion for the garden grew, so did my appetite for learning about arranging. I have signed up to courses, inhaled Instagram demonstrations and read guide books spanning 60 years.
What I have come to discover is that I enjoy building my own arrangements without the bounds of a set recipe that might threaten the easy-going, creative process.
The aim, when gathering from the garden, is to avoid destroying the beauty of your garden scape for the sake of an arrangement. It is all about compromise. I long ago moved on from the lust for pristine, commercial-length stems, as this too often meant sacrificing establishing buds.
I’m not fussy about wonkiness, as home-grown blooms are beautiful in their imperfection.
Bruised and nibbled petals, strangely developed heads and disease-touched leaves are all part of it. There is much you can do with polishing them up during the conditioning phase, but equally, the focus should remain on the calm time spent handling them and the satisfaction in growing these creatures yourself.
You aren’t selling your work, just filling your cup. I readily pluck the dying collar off an otherwise perfect dahlia bloom, shaking out the earwigs at the same time.
I don’t worry about missing Japanese anemone petals and simply scrape the lower shrivelled heads of snapdragons to enjoy the pristine ones at the top.
Nature doesn’t wait for us; be happy with what she offers.
Typically, I don’t head out to the garden with an arrangement in mind, instead letting the size and mix be dictated by the stage of the flowering that I can access. It’s about finding the balance and the best of both worlds that you have curated.
It is also about looking beyond traditional cut flowers. Where my gone-to-seed parsley used to be a frustration, I have discovered the flowers are a terrific, strong green filler in arrangements.
Occasionally, I even make a truce with my rampaging clover, nipping some perfect leaves to add to a tiny bedside posy.
Side-lining the odd drop of strawberries, raspberry cane or lemon branches from the table feeds my soul in different ways when displayed for some whimsy.
Seed heads present a whole new vibe and even roadside weeds offer incredible colour and joy when rescued from the untended wilds.
Happy New Year – taken from Flowers for Friends
This arrangement features “everyone” from my garden in January and is my best go at creating festive, floral fireworks!
I was interested to see what the result would be when challenged to use every bloom I could gather.
Paying little attention to offering up key focal points, I did away with foliage and used flowers only. One person’s headache is another’s heaven.
As with so many of my arrangements, this one was built knowing it would have its back to the wall, viewed only from the front in its position on the mantelpiece.
I used my longest and strongest stems first, including fennel, sanguisorba, the sunflower and rudbeckia to map out a loose, fanned outline.
As I began to backfill, the stronger stems of echinacea took priority, as they would be handy to support top-heavy plants like cosmos, helenium and scabiosa between them.
Like most garden-sourced flowers, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing an easy balance of flower types, instead, just offering every specimen a spot within the loud crowd.
The arrangement is supported perfectly in the ceramic urn, tightly packed with chicken wire.
“Happy New Year” arrangement features :
Large yellow rudbeckia (commonly known as black-eyed Susan or coneflower) - Rudbeckia hirta “Irish Eyes”/ Pink-petaled echinacea (commonly known as coneflower) are different cultivars of Echinacea purpurea / white echinacea -Echinacea purpurea “Alba”/ pale pink echinacea with very long petals -Echinacea pallida “Hula Dancer”/ common fennel - Foeniculum vulgare / sanguisorba (commonly known as greater burnet) - Sanguisorba officinalis / tall-growing pink thalictrum - Thalictrum delavayi “Hewitt’s Double” / pink astilbe - Astilbe chinensis var. taquetii “Lilac” / pink Japanese anemone - Anemone x hybrida “Richard Ahrens”, / burgundy cosmos Cosmos bipinnatus “Rubenza” / snapdragon - Antirrhinum majus “Madame Butterfly” / knautia (commonly known as scabious) - Knautia macedonica “Red Cherries” / dark scabiosa - Scabiosa atropurpurea “Black Knight” / red geum - Geum chiloense “Mrs Bradshaw”, / slender vervain - Verbena rigida / Orlaya (commonly known as white lace flower,) - Orlaya grandiflora / Helenium (commonly known as sneezeweed) - Helenium “Waltraut” / sunflower - Helianthus annuus “White” / shasta daisy - Leucanthemum x superbum “Fluffy”
This is an expanded version of the article featured in my Stuff ‘Homed’ gardening column for beginners , The Press, Dominion Post and other regional papers on December 30th 2021
All words and images are my own, taken in my home and garden in Christchurch, New Zealand unless otherwise captioned.
