Taking the Garden Indoors

is something that I enjoy doing. I'm nuts about flowers and plants and can never have enough of them around me. Not only do I want flowers in my garden, I also want them inside my home so that I can enjoy them 24/7.

One of the challenges a gardener faces, is having flowers in the garden all year round. I have upped the ante by planning to make bouquets from my own garden flowers all year round.

Of course, living where I do, it's not easy to have a bouquet of your own flowers during the winter months. But not impossible, if you are a bit flexible about the size of your bouquets.
Here's a very modest bouquet of Snowdrops and March Violets that I made in early February. Yes, it's tiny but the amount of pleasure I got out of it was immense.
See? Another compact and bijoux little bouquet in February.
Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to bouquets; flower, herbs, fruit and plant arrangements are great fun too and cheer up any room.
This is what I used in March to cheer up the kitchen windowsill. A few daffodils from the garden, a Cyclamen and some herbs that come in handy for cooking as well.
How about this fruit display, isn't it a sight for sore eyes and doesn't it make your mouth water as well? I love fruit, don't you? So don't limit yourself to flowers or plants, be creative and look at all kinds of things to use for decoration.
This nice little flower arrangement cheered up my living room in April, followed by, among others, these two in May.
Going out into the garden with my flower basket and secateurs, is one of the great joys of gardening for me. I love wandering around my garden, looking for flowers to cut for the vase.

I have big bunches of flowers from my own garden for about 8 months of the year, from March to October, and tiny little posies for the rest of the year. I prefer my homegrown and homemade bouquets to those from the shops as mine have more variety in the materials I use and, if at all possible, my bouquets are scented too, something that is hard to find in a shop bought bunch of flowers.
This is a shop bought bouquet that did have a scent as Hyacinths were used. But for me there are too many leaves (that are cheap) and not enough flowers (that are expensive). I prefer one of my little creations, like this one here.
I use lots of different materials but I also use all kinds of containers. Think outside the box and use whatever you can lay your hands on, like this little milk jug for instance. Cute isn't it? And those last few Sweet Peas of this year scented the whole room.
It isn't necessary to have big bunches of flowers all the time; you can create a lovely effect by making a few small posies and grouping them all together to maximize their impact like this
or this.
This is one of my most recent creations; it's made with roses, gaura, sedum and 4 different kinds of asters. October is the last month of the year that I can cut big bunches of flowers from my garden but nature is kind and gives us lots of other materials to work with in the coming months.
This little autumn display I made this weekend. It was very easy to make and except for the basket, everything else was for free. Here are the materials I used: walnuts, pine cones and acorns (collected on our walk in the forest last week, remember?), seed heads from a Clematis, leaves, a bunch of grapes, peppers and 1 pumpkin.

And last week I made a nice little wreath for my front door. I was pruning the 2 bay leaves in my kitchen garden and didn't know what to do with all those leaves when I'd finished pruning. Sure, I use a bay leaf or two for soups and stews, but what should I do with this vast amount of leaves? Well, I could use them for decoration and that's what I did.

Recently I'd bought a straw wreath for 65 cents and with it I wanted to make a simple but elegant autumn wreath, so this is what I did.
I used thin, green coloured metal wire to wrap around the wreath fixing the bay leaves to it. I made sure that every part of the straw wreath was covered by the leaves, like so.
To add a bit of colour I picked some faded Hydrangea flowers from my garden and fixed them to the wreath with the aid of my hot glue gun.
The only thing I had to do then, was adding a piece of string to hang up my wreath with. I used another natural material for that : raffia.
And here it is in all its glory, my homemade autumn wreath, costing 65 cents and 20 minutes of work. Now that's what I call cheap and cheerful, and it's so easy to make!

This is what the front entrance of my house looks like now. The bay leaves from the wreath echo those in the container. And waiting for me to come home is my feline friend Macavity. For me this spells a very warm welcome indeed.
copyright 2007: Y.E.W. Heuzen

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown,
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
Emily Dickinson, 'Autumn', 1924