In a Vase on Monday - Salvaged Flotsam

I devise my arrangement and write the main body of my  In a Vase on Monday post before I go over to Cathy's Blog called Rambling in the Garden to see what she is posting and graft in the links.  I usually put the link to Cathy's post either at the bottom of my post, or at the top, as I am doing now.  I love to find links in the contents of our posts.  Cathy's vase entitled 'What goes around' has similar themes in that sharing plants with friends brings lots of joy. 

This week my arrangement is benefiting from material from Kay's garden, and my garden and vases in coming years will benefit and be all the richer for the gift.  I shall call this Anemone Florist Kay, as Kay and her family were Florists in London, to distinguish it from Kenilworth Kay cultivars

Many of the plants in the garden are associated with friends, and though I may not always remember the long name of plants I always remember the donor:  such as White Pulmonaria Sissinghurst as Pulmonaria Kenilworth Kay!  Which if it was a seedling and was not exactly the same as its parent deserves to have the new name.

In each of my previous gardens, I have planted different varieties of Japanese Anemone, enjoying both pink and white ones.

Florist Kay very kindly offered me a clump of her Honorine Jobert  Japanese Anemones earlier this year.  As the weather was so hot and dry during early summer, I left digging them up.   Then as Summer progressed  they started putting on a fine display, so I kept putting off digging them up.  Yesterday evening seemed the ideal time, with a little respite in the rain, to dig them up, and get them into still warm earth the 'other side of the fence', with the comforting knowledge that they would still have rain for a day or two to help settle them in.  All the flowering stems were cut off, and as I piled up the prunnings, I stopped to admire the stem and seed head structure, and then decided to include them in my vase this week.

With Autumn beginning its steady hold on the garden, I have been  getting it ready for the cold and wet months.  Its the time for moving plants and planting new ones.  With prunnings piled up like some flotsam ready to rot down, invariably my eye is caught by the beauty of fading blooms.

The blooms of the Hydrangea Vanille Fraise were being buffeted by the windy gusts so had to be cut.  I kept two that had not turned brown and added them to the stems from the Anemone.  The Vase is not really quite the right size......Its a question of salvage this week!!

Flotsam is usually associated with things to do with the sea and shipwrecks as in the term flotsam and jetsam, but I love the use of the term flotsam meaning

.........things that have been rejected or discarded as worthless.

synonyms:

rubbish, debris, detritus, waste, waste matter, discarded matter, dross, refuse, remains, scrap, lumber, odds and ends;