Flower arranging class at Donkey Mill

Wednesday I attended a floral arrangement class taught by Scott, a landscape architect.  We were supposed to bring our own flowers, which they neglected to tell us, except the ladies who had taken this class before knew this.  As you can see, they are the ones with the beautiful arrangements.  I still can’t think of too many flowers we have here at the farm I can pick for an arrangement, but we sure do have a lot of interesting leaves.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching the other ladies create their masterpieces with a lot of help and encouragement from Scott.  Scott is a treat.

You start with oasis.  It must be soaked in water and his secret ingredient, vodka.  You sculpt the oasis into something round and put it on top of your container, not inside.  Then you find the flowers you want to be the focus, or “pica”.  This has to be an odd number of blooms.  Then you sweep the greens and other flowers gracefully around the pica and fill up all the holes in the oasis.  All the time you are spraying vodka water onto the underside of the flowers and leaves. 

These wonderful arrangements will last for up to a month, if you keep spraying vodka water.  The vodka is good for keeping off the bugs and helps preserve the flowers.

I got a coconut leaf end which is big enough to be a dish, put the oasis in it, and scored a bunch of leftover flowers and greens and took that home to work on.  We don’t have any vodka, however, so I don’t know when I can finish this project.

This last week I have been cleaning out the garden area so I can plant lettuce and other vegetables and herbs.  In doing this, I threw out the ferns, which were one of the favorite things to use in an arrangement.  I also dug up a lot of what I thought were weeds, but they had interesting enough texture  which I probably could have also used. 

As soon as I get some vodka, I will create something and add the photo to this post. 

Okay, it is Sunday and we have a guest for dinner so we cleaned the house and I created the flower arrangement.  I have no idea the names of the flowers or foilage in this arrangement except the citronella leaves used as fill.

Flower arrangement 8-14-2011 for Sarah