A Floral Christmas

Traditional holly wreath has proven to be challenging in Australia since our Christmas is in summer! My first Advent wreath only lasted for 1 week and on the second I have to replaced more than 75% of the fallen leaves. By the end of the third Sunday I figured out that I might as well make a second one! Which I did! One with more gold dry leaves and less of the young Summer Holly shoots- remember Holly in winter is more hardy but Christmas is in Summer here., So, I guess sometimes we need to improvise for the local condition cause the traditional textbook answer might not be the best solution.

Church Flowers 4 Sept 2010

Recently I have been very engaged in experimenting with leaves. Since my garden has a good supply of Mondo grass and Iris, I have been doing a lot of curling and weaving of leaves. Then I saw in a magazine, the Japanese “Florist”, which suggest putting a wire behind so that the leave can be “shaped”. And here is the result of my experiment. The Protea and Arums Lilies are from my garden. Ibonlt bought the big leaves and the flowering Wax. I am not very happy with placement of my Proteas but the 90 degree stems made them very hard to place.

Arranging flowers for church is a very exciting thing to do. You can get the basic concept not only from the different festivals but also from the different colours representing the different time of the church calendar.