The Bride's Bouquet

As I mentioned on Monday we wanted to make my sister's bouquet out of blue hydrangeas and white roses.  This is how the hydrangeas arrived.  Though we liked the leaves on the bouquet (we did a test run a week earlier), they wilted quite quickly.  So the first task was removing leaves and clipping the stems.  Next we separated the best flowers from the wilted or damaged one.

After that, you arrange the bouquet loosely, until you like how it looks.  Then you secure with rubber bands.

Add the floral glue (not my best look here).

Place ribbon over the glue.

We did a solid blue ribbon, then topped with a gauzy blue ribbon.  Secure them with corsage pins.

The pins are on the "back" of the bouquet, so the bride know what the best face of the bouquet is for the procession and pics.

 The finished product:

 

The bride's and bridesmaids' bouquets.

Me and my sis on the big day!

Bouquets

So, things have been busy this summer for me.  Work has been moving at a rapid clip and on top of this, my sister got married last Saturday!  It was a wonderful event and I love her and her new husband dearly.  And obviously, we worked together on the flowers. 

We used orchids for the centerpieces at the tables and I'll post photos of those later this week.  For now, I'll show you how to make a bouquet, in case you don't already know.  I blogged about a year and a half ago about my experiences working at a florist.  When I was there, I also learned how to make fairly simple bouquets for weddings.

My sister loves hydrangeas, so we did blue hydrangeas with white roses for her.  We did photos before the ceremony on a July afternoon so I actually made her two bouquets, one for the photos and a fresh one for the ceremony. The bridesmaids were all wearing different colors of the same dress, so we kept our bouquets simple -- white roses.

I got the flowers at a wholesaler called Potomac Floral Wholesale.  Since my business is related, I was able to get a wholesale account, though they are strict about who can and can't work with them.  It was a blast walking through their warehouse, seeing the endless amounts of flowers.

 

The roses were longstemmed white roses called 'Eskimo' - the color was gorgeous, with just a touch of green.  Roses are delivered packed as you see them above - 25 to a bunch.  Typically they are grown in Columbia.  In fact, rose shipments are regularly searched as they've been used to mule cocaine into the country by drug traffickers in the past.

You need a few different tools to really take best care of the flowers.  Clippers to cut the stems (the orange ones above are Felcos, which are the best).  You don't want to use scissors unless they're terribly sharp because you don't want the stems to be crushed at all, instead they should be sliced cleanly so water transfer isn't interrupted.  You can use scissors to clip the leaves off.

 

 Finally, you use a knife to slice off the thorns.  Luckily this cultivar had very few thorns, so this didn't take long.  Once you've recut the bottoms of the stems, removed the leaves and cut the thorns off, you remove the outer, bruised petals and finally, put the roses right back into the water.

 

We planned on doing 15 roses per bouquet, so next you begin to organize the roses, trying to make them into an attractive bunch.  When you like how they look, you put rubber bands around the stems, holding them together. 

 When that's done, we wrapped the bunch in floral glue, which you can pick up at a craft store.  It's double sided with adhesive.  Once the glue is wrapped around the bouquet, you wrap ribbon around the base and use corsage pins to anchor the ribbon. 

 

Photos of the bride's bouquet and more tomorrow or Wednesday!

Spring at Mom and Dad's

Last fall, one of my first major projects to start construction was facelifting my parents' 20 year old landscape.   A landscape designer had installed foundation plants like Ilex crenata which had gotten overgrown, and other undesirable choices (like the aggressively self-seeding Koelreuteria paniculata or the dreaded Bradford pear) had declined and been removed, leaving gaps.

I didn't want to go with the typical builder's foundation planting and instead wanted to play up the formality of their house and find a home for hundreds of perennials that were available for transplanting from the backyard. Finally, I wanted to center small, sculptural trees in front of the windows of their study and living room.

To accommodate one of the smaller trees I could think of (Chionanthus virginicus) we still had to widen the path.  The dotted line above indicates the previous paving.  With the help of a great landscaper/handyman, we offset the path four feet, which makes a small terrace in front of the portico which eventually will be furnished with a bench and maybe some pots.

The shot above is after installation, right around the first week in November.  Eventually the boxwoods will connect and form a hedge, hemming in the loose array of perennials and reducing the amount of visible mulch. 

Everything overwintered beautifully and as things bloom this spring and summer I'll be sharing pics.  Right now, the Allium giganteum and Iris germanica are days away from blooming and the Chionanthus is just leafing out.

Meanwhile, the Viburnum plicatum 'Popcorn' is just beginning to bloom.

And Fothergilla gardenii is in full bloom.

As is Aronia arbutitifolia.
 

...It's also worth noting all these plants have avoided being deer food!

Red Maple

I did a quick tally on my archives at this site, as well as on NYPAOS and realize I have posted about a grand total of seven maple species: Acer griseum (paperbark maple), A. capillipes (snakebark maple), A. palmatum (Japanese maple) and A. pseudoplatanus (sycamore maple) here on Planted Cloud, and A. platanoides (Norway maple), A. saccharum (sugar maple) and A. campestre (hedge maple) on NYPAOS.

 

And yet, I've never mentioned Acer rubrum, or red maple (AKA: swamp maple), which is one of my favorite of the genus.  While the fall color is highly variable (despite the common name, the leaves on this species sometimes aren't red, but yellow and orange, too), I love this plant for its spring flowers.  The photo above was taken about two weeks ago.  It's of a 25 year old specimen at my folks' place.  As you can see, the new stems are red -- they turn this color in winter/fall -- and the buds are fattening up.

 

Here's the same tree, two weeks later.  The buds have flowered into tiny puffballs of marginally diminutive flowers of petals, stamens and pistils.  The tree is monecious, which means that there are female and male specimens of the tree.  Which is a wonderful segue way for me to implore you all to pick up a copy of Dirr. At first glance, his reference book is pretty dry.  But when you really read through all his descriptions you pick up wonderful passages like the following: 

I have assessed the peculiar sexual preferences of this species -- actually quite kinky for in a give population of seedlings staminate, pistillate, monoecious and monecious with hermaphrodite (bisexual) flowers occur; an interesting anecdote concerns male trees in a 25-tree popularion on the Georgia campus that grow much faster than their seed bearing sisters; my supposition...so much stored carbohydrate is required for fruit formation that vegetative growth is reduced.  

It's simply not often enough that one employs the term 'kinky' in reference to a tree!

Anyway, back to the tree.  In addition to being highly variable in fall color, red maples differ greatly in their cold tolerance, depending on where they were first grown as seedlings.  A seedling from the south may not perform well at all in northern climes and vice versa.  These are reasons that there's a tremendous market for red maple cultivars ('Armstrong,' 'Autumn Glory' and 'October Glory' are a few classics).  Indeed, if your client wants red fall color on a red maple guaranteed, you don't want to take your chances with generic nursery stock.

Rhapis excelsa

First of all, spring is absolutely here.  Thank goodness.  First of all, last Friday, on an afternoon run by the Potomac, I saw this:

How wonderful to finally see bulbs sprout.  Then on Saturday I met my students at the USBG and spied Galanthus, Crocus, Hamamelis, Abeliaphyllum, Jasminum nudiflorum, Helleborus, Iris reticulata and a new plant that I'd never seen before, Edgeworthia (more on that later). 

But before we completely abandon the tropics for the season a final post, courtesy of my aunt: Rhapis excelsa or lady palm.  My aunt sent me the photo above and it was a sure bet she was shooting Rhapis.  The plant is native to China but was first popularized elsewhere in Japan, since the plant can handle low light levels and indoor environments.

We used Rhapis as a hedge at the Edition: Waikiki.

That's me, running quality control (smirk) on the plants we got for the hedge.  As you can see Rhapis spreads by sending up new shoots and though the plant is in the Arecaceae or palm family, many think it looks somewhat like bamboo because of this habit.  

My aunt sent this shot above, too and it demonstrates well the effects of high levels of sunlight on the plant.  If the plant gets too much light, it yellows (that's because the sun is basically overcooking the chlorophyll in the leaves, it's not because the plant has become chlorotic). Getting a deep, rich green hue is important to Rhapis growers.  In fact, a nurseryman in Waimanolo told me he fertilizes the plant with chicken droppings which works very well.  It probably can be left unsaid that the nursery itself had an unbearable stench!

 

It's quite possible the leaf in this gate detail at Park Guell is of a lady palm.  The plant became quite popular in Europe  during the Victoria era and Park Guell began construction right at the end of this period.   Rhapis is derivative of the ancient Greek work for rod and refers to the sharp shoots on which the leaves are borne.

Words About My Grandmother

The funeral services for Marian Scannapieco Gallagher were yesterday. 

Born in 1910 as Marian Scannapieco, my grandmother was many things to many people.  She was Marian the friend, cousin, sister.  She was Aunt Marian.  She was Mom.  She was Grandmom.  She was GiGi.  And she was also, simply, Mrs. Gallagher. 

A subject matter expert on the last ten decades, she regularly helped us on school history projects.  A survivor to the Spanish Flu, penny-pincher during the great depression, witness to two world wars, Vietnam and many others, she wore flapper dresses and drank in speakeasy's.  She loved to work, whether at Lit Brothers or Kohr Farms.  She'd could recall every detail of what she was doing on December 7, 1941 and compare that to exactly what she was doing on September 11, 2001.  She saw our country go through the civil rights movement, she saw men land on the moon and she survived the disco era.  She never wore jeans, and was always beautifully coiffed. In fact, I remember fondly the story she told me of her 8th grade school photo.  She thought the required midi blouses looked silly and wore clothes of her choosing to school.  She was promptly turned away and sent home.  Her mother marched her back to school in her blouse, holding her hand, and probably rolling her eyes at her daughter's stubborn streak.  Defiantly, she refused to smile for that photo.

Grandmom was a true citizen.  She was a devout Catholic and her faith helped her make sense of tragedies in her life and gave her peace during her last days.  She was a faithful voter, and she could surprise you with her decisions.  She watched the news without fail.  Even in the hospital, she was thoughtfully following Mubarak's departure from Egypt.  She was philanthropic.  Those who were in her home would see her refrigerator was covered with stickers showing the faces of children at St. Jude's she helped with her charitable donations.

For me, one of her defining moments was when, at 19,  three weeks before her marriage to Dominick, a nice Italian man, her 7 older brothers and 1 older sister approved of, she got cold feet and called off the wedding.  She simply said, "I didn't love him."  She waited for a man she loved and found him 12 years later when she married Poppie, James Gallagher.  This independent spirit makes her such a great role model for the women and girls in our family, but it's also clearly been an inspiration to the men in our family, as they have selected partners of character and strength. 

Now, that stubborn independence didn't mean the woman couldn't cook.  To know grandmom was to eat her meatballs and gravy.  If our family had a food, that would be it.  But she also knew what our special favorites would be, whether it was apple pie, or lasagna (but only if it had the little meatballs in it).  She loved to take care of people and nurture them and her wonderful cooking is a legacy we're fortunate to have.

When I think of how we can honor grandmom in our world now that she has left it, I think cooking for those we love is one way to do it.  We can hold a baby in our arms (because we've long lost count of how many children she's cherished).  We can simply hold someone's hand to comfort them.

It was difficult to do that for grandmom over the past few weeks, it was painful to see her suffer.  She had always said she'd wanted to die in her sleep, but we knew she'd be too stubborn to go without a fight.  I think she held on not for herself, but for us.  So that we can all feel our bonds are stronger now then they were before, and so we could begin to prepare for her absence from earth. That selflessness was another way grandmom showed her profound love and grace. 

Marian on her 100th birthday, June 28, 2010.