Our air conditioner has been running today, this always seems odd to me given the month is February. This explains why I have Summer flowers to provide Winter cheer. It’s warm in South Florida!
Despite the black vase, the colors of the flowers are so bright and happy and the foliage is Pineapple Sage – It’s like a bowl of summer radiating an herbal fruity scent of the tropics in my foyer. During the completion of the arrangement I had to relocate two whitish green garden spiders (with the long front legs) outside and suffer a proper foliage selection dither (chartreuse or deep green?) Pineapple Sage won based on color and scent. I was cheered by this vase once I finished it.
The vase is a thrift store find I have enjoyed tremendously, I hope whoever made it feels the happiness it generates for me. I placed a glass flower frog inside the vase to support my Zinnias; they are oddly short stemmed (day length not long enough?) A majority of the flowers were grown from seed by me. This is a first for me as I usually buy plants and not seeds. The seeds were a bit of work – the results have been fun to witness.
There are two colors from the Texas Vintage Rose Celosia mix hanging over the edge, the jury is still out on this series of seed. The plants are just not that attractive, and in my heart, I think Celosia is weird. Trying to keep an open mind as is does thrive in my sugar sand. So far, anyway, I will be interested to see what summer brings.
The Zinnias are a mystery – I planted several kinds of seeds and these don’t really look like any of the pictures on the seed packets. Yellow and red Gallardia (Gallardia pulchella) and a seedhead are stalwarts in my garden and provide nectar for many butterflies – the Tropical Red Salvia (Salvia coccinea) in the background (in peachy mode) does as well. The thick stems with blue flowers are Blue Porterweed (Stachytarpheta jamaicaensis) another amazing nectar plant for butterflies. The backdrop of fragrant chartreuse foliage is from Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) there is a red Pineapple Sage flower in there as well.
I have been having trouble commenting on blogspot blogs – if anyone knows how to fix this please let me know! Thanks.
Happy Gardening!
The Shrub Queen 
Winter cheer indeed. A lovely collection
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Thank you Dorris
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Beautiful arrangement.
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Thank you.
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How lovely and well done on growing it all from seed. We need a bit of warm here and your glowing colours are just the ticket.
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Thank you, I hope a little warm crept in despite Dennis. Or maybe to spite Dennis!
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I like the celosia. It really grabbed my eye.
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Thanks, I will post a picture of the plant and see what you think!?
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As usual in my enthusiasm to find something that will grow well in this climate, I planted Pink Flamingo Celosia which grows 5 feet tall and reproduces like crazy. I also shared it with my sister-in-law and she still cruses me for it. The flowers look similar to yours.
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Uh-oh, well I will keep cutting the flowers! Thanks.
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Those colours are lovely and warming. 😀 The zinnias are full of zing. Gorgeous!
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Thanks, Cathy..zzinging Zinnias here.
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These all work so well together – it’s really attractive. I’m just a tad envious that your zinnea from seed are blooming about, oh, five months before mine will!
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Thanks, Chris. In five months I probably won’t have any Zinnias so will be envious of yours.
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I love the color mix, which is particularly effective against that glassy black vase. The chartreuse foliage choice was perfect. AC! Yet another demonstration of how different our climates are – our heater is still running nearly continuously (but that’s partly because we’re wimps in dealing with cool temperatures).
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Does winter even count as a season there? We sometimes refer to it as the few days of ‘not summer’, and we get more of it than yo do.
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We call it not summer here.. short lived and no pansies or redwoods
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Pansies sort of suit a ‘prolonged’ not summer. Redwoods don’t care what season it is . . . or isn’t.
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Just beautiful. Made me smile and think of summer.
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Thank you
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Love the bright pink and chartreuse color combination. I too can not comment on anyone on Blogger or Blogspot. They don’t play well with WordPress anymore and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it. If you notice on those sites, all comments are by other Blogger members. I feel bad because like you, I read their posts but my comments just disappear into thin air.
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Thank you, I see one of my wordpress friends commenting and I will ask her and let you know if I figure it out. My comments are disappearing like that. Annoying.
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Saw this last week. Sorry to be so tardy posting my admiration. Just perfect in every way!
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