In a Vase on Monday is celebrating its sixth anniversary this Monday. Cathy, of Rambling in the Garden blog, created and hosts this meme weekly and challenged us to create a miniature vase (6″x6″) in honor of the anniversary. This ‘vase’ is just under that and I added a crystal for Cathy as I know she likes crystals.
I decided to use shells and a tiny glass pot as my containers and then determined that they wouldn’t hold water. An additional challenge, waterless vase. The shells are a Tortoiseshell Cowrie in the glass pot and a Lightning Whelk. These shells are common to the east coast of Florida and were found on this beach near the Fort Pierce Inlet about 20 miles north of my house.
The Lightning Whelk holds one of our native Bromeliads (Tillandsia utriculata). These are commonly known as Air Plants and it is actually illegal to collect them in Florida. Most are grown in South America and shipped to Florida, this one came up on its own in a nearby Oak and I moved it to a booted Sabal Palm.
The brown pods are from a Senna ligustrina, another native I planted as a larval host for Sulphur Butterflies.
Here are the Tillandsias in the booted Sabal Palm, I am planning to add Burgundy Bromeliads and some Cattleya Orchids to the Palm. The boots are the bases of old fronds, many palms are cleaned up with a chain saw for a smooth trunk.
The Tortoiseshell Cowrie holds the dried stems of a seedhead from an Adonidia Palm (Veitchii merrilli). The stems are white until the berries ripen and then turn brown. The white stems are from a younger seedhead.
A heartfelt thank you to Cathy for hosting IAVOM, it is an addictive pleasure to share a weekly vase with gardeners from all over the world – and to see theirs! To see more miniature sixth-anniversary celebrations follow this link More Vases.
Happy Anniversary and Happy Gardening!
The Shrub Queen 
This IS addictive, isn’t it? Your waterless (!) vase sounds so complicated, yet looks simple and elegant. Beautiful!
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Thanks, Chris – yes, I start thinking about the vase on Saturday every week.
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I love your use of shells with plants. Really interesting
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Thanks, Dorris – Happy Monday
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Your arrangement is very creative. I didn’t know that Florida had native air plants.
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Thank you, actually there are numerous Air Plants here – one with pretty flowers Cardinal Air Plant.
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A very suitable theme seeing your proximity to the Atlantic. I didn’t know that Cowrie shells were native to our shores, for some reason I always thought they were from the South Pacific. Who knows what one can learn while blogging. 🙂
The palm boots are perfect for epiphytes, like hanging pictures on a wall, lovely growing ones at that. I remember seeing ball-shaped epiphytes on power lines, are these similar?
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Thanks, Eliza. I actually had to look up the Lightning Whelk’s name – the Cowries are fairly common but big ones like that are seen after storms. Yes, there is a Tillandsia called Ball Moss and Spanish Moss is another.
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I wondered if a teeny arrangement might be hard for you, knowing how Large yours often are – so well done!! What a great result, and I think many of us will have learned a number of new things about the shells and the ‘air plants’. You didn’t specify what the crystal was though – I wondered if it was amazonite? Thanks for your continued enthusiasm for the meme
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Thank you, Air Plants were popular here in the 70s I think. They make good houseplants but need humidity. The crystal is from my father, the geology professor – I could swear it was soapstone but cannot recall exactly.
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Yes I remember them from the 70s or thereabouts 🙂
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A fascinating post featuring more new plants for me to get to know. 🙂 Using the shells was a great idea. The air plants look very happy in your palm tree. 🙂
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Thanks, Cathy. Probably not something you would see in Germany!! I have to find things to do with all the shells I find, they are not usually that big. I have a feeling there will be a lot of Air Plants in that Palm.
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I love this, no flowers but texture and shapes. I love shells and stones and I pick them up wherever I go. Lovely to see them combined with seed pods and a tillsandia too which looks a bit like a sea anemone.
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Thanks, Liz I pick up rocks and shells as well. The Tillandsia does look like a Sea Anemone!
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You took your arrangement out of the box in using those shells as your vases, Amelia. I wish I’d thought of that, as I was hard pressed to find vases small enough for this challenge. The Tillandsias and seedpods are perfect too. I’ve been looking for a natural way to display my own small collection of Tillandsias – you’ve made me wish I had a palm on hand. (Eek – no pun intended!)
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IAVOM from around the world and in so many forms…yours is a wonderful contrast from ‘warmer shores’ than mine…we have had snow and sun this week. What fun. Thanks for this amazing arrangement.
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Thank you.
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How imaginative! The whole thing would make a lovely screen print with all those textures, especially form of the palm seed heads.
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Thank you, I like that idea.
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Spectacular Amelia! Creative and great design. Love that beach too.
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Thanks
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Dramatic!
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That is cool to use the dried stems of palm bloom. My colleague down south brought in a big bloom of a Canary Island date palm back in the early 1990s. He thought it was cool all done up with Christmas lights and leaning in a corner. It sort of was. However, when I brought in dried agapanthus and New Zealand flax blooms, he made fun of them.
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