This little old-fashioned vase is the one object I would save in an emergency… it is a small turquoise blue ceramic vase that my gran gave me for my first flower show, eons ago, when I was a child growing up in Durban, South Africa.
I think the flowers I ‘arranged’ in that first small creative effort were pansies, my gran’s favourite flowers. It has moved with me from home to home and if anything happened to it or it was chipped, I would be very sad.
I thought I would offer a resumé of its various looks in spring and keep on showing off how good most flowers look when paired with it.
The season started with winter’s best flowers, snowdrops. I love the way they hold themselves above the rim of the vase, making it easy for me to view them properly.
Snowdrops show the vase off well and make their own good display.
I don’t always pick flowers specially for the house – although I do pick a handful from those that are plentiful. Others come into the house for one reason or another – perhaps they have had to make way for something else in the garden or have been knocked by wind and rain. Then they come inside.
These tulips were in a large pot hidden under a tarpaulin while my new wooden shed and garden room were being constructed. When I saw them they were almost past their best as garden flowers but they made a brave and bright show in another vase (ie not my gran’s vase).
Strong blue hyacinths and grape hyacinths are good for my spring collections. These had been in the way of the work on the new garden room, so instead of leaving them on the ground, they too, were harvested for the vase.
Tulips made a splash of colour indoors after being neglected outdoors. Their sunny red and yellow tones go well with the hyacinths that have naturalised in the garden.
One of the many displays in spring came from a local friend’s garden.
Primroses are the signature plant of my garden in spring as they self-seed and spread where ever they want to. I don’t like the muddy pink hybrids that arise and mostly dig them up.
There are enough primroses to fill ten vases if I wish, but they do work well with other spring subjects such as sprigs of rosemary that have been blooming in the greenhouse.
The self-seeding primroses and pulmonarias always get a head-start in the gravel paths between my raised herb and salad beds. This means I can lift them easily if I want the place to look a little more business-like. Mostly I leave them to spread and know that there are always more to follow.
Gravel is a good seed-bed for self-sowing spring plants.
Easy pickings from pulmonaria and primroses.
Next up will be lily-of-the-valley: the little round collars are up and the buds are just visible. It won’t be long before these fragrant white bells will be offering their scent to the house.
Lily-of-the-valley is traditionally given by children to their mothers on May 1, especially in France.
But for now I couldn’t resist a handful of the fiery red wallflowers, whose scent gets through to my almost non-existent sense of smell. I feel sure it is such a powerful fragrance that you can smell it from here! Heady and delicious!
Setting the room alight with colour and fragrance, wallflowers are among the best spring plants for the garden.
I just love those little ‘found’ bunches for the house. At the moment I have a bunch of Clematis armandii pulled off a rose it was strangling. The scent in the house is amazing, much stronger than I had realised. There is also little pot of Ballerina tulips, unseasonably early and behaeded by the dogs antics. I will make sure to take photo in future as a reminder of these unexpected treasures.
Hi Marysa, it is great to know that we can ‘beachcomb’ our garden finds and enjoy them fleetingly. I will look forward to seeing your seasonal garden finds. Hope you have a lovely spring in your garden.
You’re right about how well the different spring flowers look in the pretty turquoise vase – and such variety from the unobtrusive snowdrops to the vivid wallflowers!
I love the way primroses spread in lawns and tumble down the banks of ditches by the roadside. I have never picked any from the garden, but if there were to be rain, I would now be tempted to pick some from the lawn and place them on my desk.
Morning Sarah, it is hard to pick flowers from the garden but when I have this richesse of primroses etc or when stems are broken etc I don’t feel so bad !
We must try to meet up one day… in Suffolk or Norfolk!
That would be lovely – did you get my text a few weeks ago?