Gardening: Easy bouquets bring brilliant colors inside

While the vegetable gardens are having their issues this summer, the flower gardens are having a blooming good time.

The extra cool weather and moisture got the perennials off to a good start and the heat has brought everything into prolific bloom.

While its nice to see the flowers in the garden, it even more fun to bring the color indoors. Here’s a way to make a simple bouquet, courtesy of a garden writer friend.

Author Lorene Edwards Forkner begins her bouquets by walking through the garden in the early morning and picking the flowers and foliage that catch her eye. Forkner is an author and artist who writes about the wonders of the natural world and captured the wonder of color in the garden in her book “Color In and Out of the Garden.”

Choose a selection of show stoppers, color spots, colorful foliage and maybe some interesting clumps of seed heads, berries or branches. Picking the flowers in the early morning means they will be well hydrated. Place all the floral material in a deep bucket of cool water until you are ready to make your arrangement.

When you begin building your bouquet, lay out the cuttings to see what you have. Pull together greenery in one hand, weaving the stems together to make a lattice to hold the rest of the bouquet. Pick your show-stopper flowers for the center of the bouquet and insert them into the foliage bundle.

With these in place, begin inserting your color spots, turning the bundle a quarter turn as you go until its full. Because this is a casual garden bouquet, a strict color theme is not important – if you like it, it works. By weaving all the stems together as a bundle, the bouquet will stay together.

Once all the flowers and foliage are in place, its time to add fun bits of interest like a cluster of berries, seed heads, vines or small branches with interesting bark or twists and turns. With this done, wrap the base of the bouquet with strands of raffia and tie it off. This is insurance to keep the bunch in order and makes it easy to toss the spent bouquet into the compost pile. Trim off the stems to make the bundle even, so it goes into a container.

Almost anything that holds water can be used as a container. Formal vases will add an air of elegance while casual containers will emphasize the just-from-the-garden look.

Forkner prefers not to use the floral foam that most florists use to hold the bouquet together. Instead, she hunts for old fashion flower frogs at thrift stores and garage sales. Frogs are heavy weights with wires or prongs that stick up so you can push flowers into them in the containers. Forkner also uses waded-up balls of chicken wire as a frog and sticks the bouquet stems into it. Fill the vase with cool water and a packet of flower preservative and you have your bouquet. Enjoy!