Glorious Blooms in the Urban Summer Garden

Since my partner and I moved into our current apartment six years ago we've been working hard on our urban backyard garden. It's great for growing flowers to use in ikebana, and in my mind that makes them the best kind. We've dug up lots of the backyard(with permission from our landlords) and created a space we love and cherish. Every year brings new things and a sense of excitement before, during and at the end of the growing seasons. I try to choose plants that I know will make great flowers for ikebana, but always seem to also get things that can be difficult to use. That's part of the challenge of ikebana, the mystery of what the outcome will be. If we knew exactly how it would turn out, some of the fun, challenge and discovery of creating would be lost.

The arrangement that you see here is made entirely with flowers from our garden . I wanted to used all blue flowers, since that has been our featured color this summer in early plantings. However I also used some violet colored flowers, and some chartreuse plant materials and I figured since they were all located together on the color wheel that they would be perfect together. I included lisianthus in both violet and white with a blue rim, blue balloon flowers, blue echinops, green spearmint and scented geranium leaves, blue angelonia and some stems of lavender. You might wonder what this arrangement has to do with ikebana, and there is a good answer. This would be considered a Moribana arrangement which literally means "piled up". If you would like to know more about ikebana , you can visit Ikebana International.