The mild weather of the last month led to a few surprises in the garden this week. First of all I spotted some flowering cow parley in a weedy patch (which was used as a dumping ground for spare soil in the summer last year) and I was also astonished to see that Achillea millefolium 'Cassis' (Yarrow)  still had some purple flowers. Nowhere near as spectacular as this summer, but purple and purple/red it was! 

My bouquet quickly took shape in my head. Bare twiggly branches would give it structure and foliage would come from the green pompom heads of Dianthus Barbatus 'Green Trick' which haven't all yellowed yet as well as some olive branches and ivy. 

So I picked everything and laid it out on the picnic table.

That's when the trouble began. 

The twigs, from a neighbour's overhanging tree which will produce some lovely catkins in a month or so, were laying flat in the vase, giving it a diameter of about 2 meters. The cow parsley had actually been growing horizontally (as you can hopefully see on the picture below) and the flowers with their curved stems were completely impossible to arrange.

Add to this a toddler who also started to "help" cutting flower stems and the wind that blew over the vase, I quickly ended up in the conservatory trying to rescue it. Although I had managed to tie the branches together with an elastic band so they actually stood up in the vase, it was still huge. The vase's destination is the dinner table and we still have to be able to have dinner. It looked dramatic, but I could really do without the drama of it being knocked over. So all in all, I decided that less was more, as it usually is. 

I threw out the cow parsley, cut a good 20 cm off the twigs and added some Echinacea seedheads and, finally this is the end result:

The Echinacea seedheads are quite delicate, with seed falling out by simply touching it. In one of the heads I spotted one impatient seed that had already germinated (bottom left in the picture below).

I grew some shasta daisies in the garden this summer and those seedheads were simply green in the autumn! I potted a few up and they are doing really well.  

I am also trying to propagate the 'Green Trick' Dianthus. I bought three plugs last summer and they grew lush and produced many stems and will hopefully do so for a few years. The flowers don't actually produce any seeds, which explains why they keep for weeks and weeks in a vase as well as on the plant. This poor plant is continuously trying, but failing, to produce the next generation, which of course was the purpose of its breeders who have created a storm in the cut flower industry. I have potted up two cuttings in the greenhouse and we'll see what happens.    

Further on the note of seeds, I am planning to attend Seedy Sunday this Sunday 19th January in Trumpington. (Click here for details.) It looks like I could bag a few more cut flower seeds by swapping some from the garden. As there are also children's activities among other things, I've decided that the £1.50 entry should come out of the leisure budget rather than the cutflower one, but let me know if you think this is cheating!

Today for the seed swap I have collected some seeds from Rudbeckia Cherry Brandy (brilliant ruby red annual - and I didn't grow any other rudbeckias so I'm pretty sure it'll come true), Echinacea (just the purple variety) and Helenium Helena mixed (autumn yellow/red perennial). Hopefully these will end up as flowers in someone else's arrangements. 

Till next week!

Ps The cats left the willow wreath alone, but the toddler found playing with the crab apples great fun. The wreath has moved to one of the outside tables now, by the way.