Inspired by the lovely pink pussies of Salix gracilistyla ‘Mount Aso’ featured in my last Six on Saturday and a sudden glut of blooms on Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’, creating today’s vase began easily. Selecting stems of the former that wouldn’t detract from the shrub and reaching flowering stems of the latter proved a little challenging, but it was easy enough to choose additional material to complete the contents, with witch hazel H vernalis ‘Amethyst’ and foliage of Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’ providing different degrees of pinkness.
Although the viburnum flowers over a period of months, it is not often that the tree is covered with blooms at any moment in time, but it was yesterday, and the fragrance hung delightfully in the mild January air. The witch hazel, as Hamamelis vernalis, tends to start flowering a little later than the others in the garden, which are all H intermedia, but not so this year. I mentioned the lop-sidedness of the willow on Saturday and although it might be worth digging the plant out and turning it so the side killed by the cold was to the back, having risked the move that preceded this damage I don’t want to subject it to further risk.
Initially, I was toying with ‘pink pussies’ for inclusion in the title of today’s IAVOM, but with the other contents carrying equal weight this no longer seemed viable. ‘Sticks of Pink’ came to mind instead and with tongue in cheek I felt it was a shame not to have a stick of rock as a prop. In a lightbulb moment, however, I remembered this novelty teapot, bought on a whim as it was ridiculously cheap, a long time before IAMOV and vase props were even a twinkle in my eye – I find it hard to believe how perfect it is for my sticks of pink! Incidentally, although
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