Decorating the Home with Flowers

Luculia gratissima

Summer wedding ceremonies usually took place in our garden but on many occasions the wedding party would come into the house to sign the register and I liked to fill the house with joyous flowers. Even in the dead of Winter I was able to find growing material to create the feeling that the garden was part of our house or that the house was part of the garden, depending on one's philosophy!

One wedding day, when Tasmania was not enjoying a particularly cold Winter, I searched in vain for a few beautiful flowers to place in the vases. The wonderfully exotic Winter plant Luculia gratissima that delights me with its cluster of pink flowers and amazing, haunting perfume had refused to come out in time for this occasion. The winter blooming Winter Sweet, Chimonanthus praecox is useful with its spicy perfume but our shrub was also sulking about the adverse weather conditions. Desperately I looked around and I noticed that the ivy, growing to the top of the old almond tree, was very much in need of a hair cut. Putting two and two together I cut armfuls of the evergreen leaves and took them inside where I wound them around the pedestal of the small antique table that was used to sign the wedding register. Having many graceful garlands left over, I also 'sticky taped' them to the highly carved fire mantel. My creative juices stirred, I remembered that the other decorative winter shrub, Garrya elliptica was in bloom. I rushed outside and cut the long, greyish-green catkins. I trimmed the leaves and twigs and added them to the ivy garland along the fireplace. On their own, the blooms of grey-green sprays looked rather wishy-washy but cascading down from the green ivy leaves they formed a picture of delicate beauty of a rather Chinese character.