Say It With Flowers

Last week I was inspired by the Rita Konig-styled house in Lonny Magazine to create some wild-flower style arrangements in the Nest over the weekend. When it comes to flowers, I like to keep things simple. So when I took Penny and Enrique (our two adorable and highly excitable jack russells) for a walk on Saturday, I headed down the road with them to my favourite local florist, Living Flowers (who did the gorgeous flowers for our wedding last summer), and picked up a big bunch of gypsophila.

I know a lot of people think of gypsophila as a 'filler flower', but personally I love to see a vase full of gypsophila, with the soft clouds of tiny white flower heads contrasting with the more sculptural look of the stems in what strikes me as a rather pleasing Japanese style.

After the dogs pulled me home again, straining at their leashes (note to self number one, do not try to walk dogs while carrying large amounts of flowers. Note to self number two, must train dogs to walk nicely on their leads like every other dog owner that I was embarrassingly pulled past at top speed, shedding petals as I went, seems to have managed to do) - I headed out into the garden and cut a whole bunch of olive and eucalyptus leaves, and picked some lovely purple lavender heads.

Over the past two years we have planted five eucalyptus trees and seven olive trees in the back garden, all of which need pruning regularly, and provide lots of lovely free foliage for decorating the house.

Once I'd prepared the flowers by stripping away the leaves (gypsophilia need the leaves removing so you can better appreciate the shape of the stems), I filled lots of vases with water (the Nest is full of vases - the larger glass ones live in the kitchen drawers, waiting to be used, while the smaller ceramic, patterned vases live permanently on the shelves in the living room) and then simply dropped some flowers and foliage into each vase.

I like to group vases that have different shapes, but are made from the same material. For example, the vases in the bottom right are all glass - one is actually a crystal glass that belonged to my Grandma (this makes me think that building family heirlooms into the house would make an interesting future post).

So there you have it - with a bunch of gypsophila and an armful of free flowers and foliage from the garden, I created some simple but pretty arrangements that should brighten the Nest for the next few weeks.

I'll be back tomorrow to introduce you to a new series of posts that I'm working on called 'Out of the Picture' - interiors based on famous paintings. See you again soon!