Even a carefully planned garden may have a run of flowers of only one kind for several days or even a week or more.
Consequently, most of us can remember times during the garden season when we didn’t enjoy cutting flowers for the house as much as usual simply because there didn’t seem to be any variety.
Maybe we said to ourselves, “There isn’t a thing to cut in the garden,” though we meant, “There is only one kind of flower in the garden, and it’s so monotonous having the same thing in the house all the time.”
Use of Foliage
The use of foliage has become an important consideration in our flower arrangements, so we no longer feel the necessity of selling the idea.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of room to appreciate how much variety we can have simply by selecting different kinds of foliages.
The same flower may become part of an arrangement airy and delicate in feeling or bold and precise, simply by selecting foliage.
Let’s pretend for the moment that we have nothing in the garden suitable for cutting except target-shaped flowers like dahlias, zinnias, or calendulas, and also that we cannot anticipate an enlargement of the selection in the immediate future.
Then let’s browse among the foliages, along the shrub borders, and even in the vegetable garden. And trees, too, especially evergreens in variety, will broaden our possibilities.
Feathery foliages, lacy foliages, leaves with the lacquer-like surface, intricately veined foliages, ruffles of green—what a choice confronts us! Even roadside weed foliage may strike our fancy!
Selections For Arrangement
For one arrangement, we may use a few large flowers low in a container to get a compact mass, and we can achieve height with far-reaching lightness in the way of larch or jackpine.
Another time, we may try heavy flowers low in the container with upward-reaching, clearly cut, sword-like leaves of Japanese iris.
Again, for this same type of group, we may select a spray of leaves, fountain-like, from a daylily plant. Again, look around with an eye to the foliages with interesting line values.
If we use smaller flowers and include some high buds, foliage that is dark and waxy like ivy offers a choice for low weight.
Another time, the furry gray leaves of the Mullein family will afford a welcome change. The gardener who has planted half a dozen or more different hostas has a wealth of material when she seeks foliage to use in a low bowl.
Principles of Combining Flowers and Foliage
The broadleaved evergreens offer still further selection. Here are some suggestions on the principles of combining flowers and foliage:
Use more foliage or more flowers, according to your desire, but don’t use an equal area of each. Even when we combine two or more kinds of flowers, one kind should dominate.
In very hot weather, the cool effect of dominating green makes an especially enjoyable arrangement.
We want our foliage to contrast with our flowers. Probably the contrast will be in both size and shape, certainly in one or the other.
Contrast of Textures
The contrast of textures is important, although textures may contrast so completely as to be out of harmony—as when the bold target flowers we’ve mentioned are combined with columbine foliage or maidenhair fern.
For instance, the more moderate contrast of larch and zinnias gives an example of more harmonious textures.
When we use foliages, we don’t have to think of them as something separate from flowers but as green flowers for our arrangements.
When we think of them in this way, we are likely to use them more often and to use them well, applying all the same principles to the use of foliage that we do to flowers.
44659 by Dorothy Biddle And Dorothea Blom