Poppy Seed Heads in a Vase on Monday

This week's post and arrangement has been inspired by finding these on the soil in the garden.  Gastropods that is to cover all the little snails and slugs that are currently not only tidying away fallen items but also green living material.

 They are so beautiful and hopefully I will have time this week to make a sketch of them.

How did they get to be like that?  A few weeks ago I threw out the dried flower arrangement that had been gracing our dining room for over a year, and had chucked the seed heads over one of the beds.  I love poppies, and after they have filled a gap, and set seed, I harvest them and stick them in a vase. 

 Only last Sunday I decided to cut off the heads of this year's crop to harvest the poppy seeds which I use in my baking.  The seeds are smaller than the commercially available baker's poppy seeds, and it just gives me so much satisfaction to use whatever is in the garden.

Well it is a Vase on Monday, so I had better get on with something in a vase. The poppy seed heads had been sitting in the taller of the glass vases, and yes I had even kept the stems as the form of the pale straw and green stems added a dramatic composition especially with when the shadows fall against the wall.  

That probably doesn't cut the mustard so a little close up of a very pretty glass vase, a present from my Australian sister, from one of her holidays.  This vase is a little work of art, as within the blue glass are slices of smaller 'flowers' of glass and the surface is marbled with gold leaf applied before the glass is fully blown out.

Just as somewhere to put them, there are some blooms that I had made with wire. And just my chance it was in here that I had deposition the tiniest of the poppy seed heads.

Later when I have rattled my seed heads empty, I shall scatter the empty ones over the garden, and watch as each day more of the outer casing is etched away, and hopefully I shall be able to harvest more eroded seed heads, and am already planning what to do with them.

A short note about the pie dish that I used this year to lay the seed heads in.  It is a stoneware pie dish by the studio potter Simon Eeles.  I spoke with him at his exhibition at Ford Abbey when I went with our WI group 'Bloomin Fun' a couple of years ago and fell in love with this piece.

For real fresh flower arrangements Cathy will have come up with something beautiful, and I am sure there will be many more linked into her post this week.