Late October Floral Gleanings

The flowers in the house challenge today, being Halloween, was to create something goth, or at least Halloweenish. And when I peeked late last night at the blog page of the instigator of this monthly blog crawl, I was truly amazed, inspired, and intimidated.  If you haven't been to see Jane's "Flowers in the House of Horror" yet, you really must. And from there visit all the wonderful blogs sharing their exquisite arrangements.

By comparison, mine is the floral equivalent of throwing a sheet over your head with a couple of eye holes cut out before heading out to beg candy from the neighbors. Oh, well, we do what we can with our limited resources and talents.

I went out into my garden yesterday evening and gathered several black-eyed susan seedheads, as well as some dogwood stems trimmed from my newly planted little shrub, a few grasses, and twisty willow twigs—from the corkscrew willow stems I put in my front step urn last fall, which sprouted in the spring, and which I finally planted in a big old whiskey barrel on the south side of the house a couple of weeks ago, because I don't want a monstrous willow taking over my yard, but I hated to just get rid of them. I figure this way I will have a source of cuttings, and if it doesn't survive the winter in a barrel, well, I'm none the worse for having tried. But I digress.

I combined these garden gleanings with a few of the dark red mums I have in a pot on the patio, and the flowers that were still good in a bouquet that a friend brought over last weekend (another form of gleaning), which included some orange lilies and more dark red mums and green mums and a few greenish alstromeria, which I figured were all the right colors (I dumped the ferns; I do have some aesthetic sensibilities). But now I see that all those flowers overwhelm the twigs and seedheads that would have given the bouquet a more Halloweenish flavor. I probably should have made two bouquets.

But, no time for that, I need to go grocery shopping, and I haven't even been to the store to stock up on candy for the little darlings who will come to the door yet. Horrors!