Nothing brings a room to life like flowers or plant life. I am a reluctant houseplant Mom…We didn’t get a pandemic puppy, kitten, or air fryer, but, at the urging of the diva, we did acquire quite a few pandemic houseplants, some of which are still alive. I’m generally not a fan of anything that requires a feeding and maintenance schedule that rivals a newborn.
Speaking of the Diva, September is birthday month here - her birthday is this week and her brother’s is next week. Happy almost fall, y’all! Autumn means waning flowers, but we brought some fall and some nature inside with some unexpected bounty from the garden this week, and I wanted to share the saga with you.
Way lower commitment than plants, is a container of cut flowers or greenery! You strip any leaves that will be below the water line, and change the water if it starts to look murky, and when they fade, you throw them out.
Well this week, I’ve managed FREE cut greenery and flowers from an unexpected source…I’ve talked about cutting flowers or branches from the yard before, but this week was a whole new level of recycling stuff from the garden.
the perennial garden at the beginning of summer…pre milkweed invasion, lots of loosestrife leaves prior to blooming
It all started with a spurt of productivity - pulling the erstwhile milkweed out of the garden. I use the term garden loosely. Most of my garden beds are a hot mess and full of uninvited weeds (note the crop of violets in the picture above). But weeds are just really hardy (and okay, often invasive) plants that keep turning up with a persistence I wish some of my other plants would emulate. I try to think of them in a more positive light and let them be most of the time…especially if they are attractive or beneficial for the wildlife. And let’s be honest, I’m pretty much laziness personified when it comes to gardening, so anything interesting that volunteers to grow? I’m all for it.
Back to the milkweed. A bunch of it turned up in my perennial bed this year, where I have some other relatively indestructible ‘ahem’ plants…yellow primrose, and yellow loosestrife (before something ate it…ALL of it late this summer) alongside the irises, lilies, azaleas and assorted other things that I put there on purpose.
I had amassed an armload of it and was only halfway through the bed when my daughter pointed out that it was leafy and green and maybe we should stick it in a vase. Why not, indeed? Totally worth a try.
I brought it inside, washed all the sticky milky sap and dirt off my hands, and started trimming and cleaning it up and dumping it in a tall vase. It looked spectacular! All the dramatic impact of a fiddle leaf fig without the drama of trying to keep a plant happy. Especially a diva plant like a fiddle leaf!
milkweed from the fall garden cleanup recycled as cut greens #milkweedexperiment #arrangement
I had a bunch of shorter pieces still so I cleaned those up too and put them all in my favorite large stoneware pitcher. And so the great #milkweedexperiment was underway.
milkweed stems pulled from the garden make a striking arrangement in a pitcher
I didn’t hold out much hope for it lasting - I figured the sap would clog up the stems like it does in cut hydrangeas about 50% of the time and they would stop drinking and droop and die by the next day. But lo and behold the next day it all looked just as good or better.
We are on day 4 now and it still looks great…at this point, it has outlasted many cut flower bouquets I’ve paid good money for at the grocery store, and it was free!
For those of you with me in the ‘go big or go home’ camp, let me just say the impact of a 30” tall, lush arrangement of leafy weeds is incredible…
our cut milkweed stems, holding up beautifully, make a dramatic statement on the coffee table
I have a plant identifier app on my iphone called Picture This which I originally installed to figure out what some of the plants were I was seeing in our arboretum, but now I’ve been using it to identify all kinds of stuff in my own yard. You take a photo of the plant in question with the phone and it will tell you not only what it is but all kinds of other info about it too.
I’d been eyeing the other front garden bed under the trees since it has sprouted an unbelievable bounty of a plant with pretty lacy white tiny daisy shaped flowers. I used my handy dandy plant app to discover it was white wood aster - I seem to have a bit of blue wood aster as well, but only a few stems as compared to the abundance of the white variety.
white wood aster in the front garden
Emboldened by my newfound success with cut weeds, I went out and cut armloads of it - which didn’t even make a dent in what was growing out there.
armloads of white wood aster #cutflowers
I arranged it in my favorite vase. That too is holding up spectacularly - who knew??? I have a fondness for wild looking, uncontrived arrangements and weeds is as wild as it gets!
a lavish vase of white wood aster, plucked from the yard #floralarrangement
Now, I’m looking at the massive amounts of orange jewelweed in my yard. This is apparently the hummingbird equivalent of a McDonalds drive thru…and perhaps half the reason they seem to be around but ignoring my feeder. I don’t think they’ll miss them if I cut a few stems to drag inside and see how they hold up. The flowers are a perfect bright golden orange color for fall decor. The ones that stay in the great outdoors will eventually produce seed pods that burst when touched spewing seeds in all directions…which kinda sounds like fun!
orange jewelweed blossom
What wild things are in YOUR yard just waiting to be harvested to add some unexpected liveliness to your rooms?
