I am holding out hope for cooler weather as the dog days of summer officially end on August 11. I doubt that will bring an end to our daily high temperatures of over 90 F, but one can dream. September brings an average high of 89. October is when the real cool down begins. Rain is still copious and all the more tropical summer flowers are relishing the moisture and flowering with reckless abandon.
I challenged myself this week to create a vase with gardenias that wasn’t all white or seemingly formal. This is the easy, breezy, country casual gardenia vase. Tropical version.
The vase started out in a mason jar. Very casual country. The clear glass showed too much of the weird and thick tropical stems of the bromeliad and palm. Who ever thought stems would be distracting? The vase needed clothes. A basket a friend sent with a gardenia plant (I killed it, G. jasminoides) was pressed into service.
The red and yellow flowers are parrotflowers (Heliconia psittacorum ‘Lady Di’); the red and blue tipped flowers are miniata bromeliads (Aechmea miniata); white flowers are tropical gardenias (Tabernaemontana diviricata); white green stems with berries are adonidia palm (Veitchii merrillii) unripe fruit; striped foliage is martin bromeliad (Neoregelia martinii); ferny accents are asparagus fern.
Another view:
Thanks to Cathy at ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com for hosting this weekly array of floral abundance. Follow the link to see more vases.
Happy Gardening!!
The Shrub Queen 
Very nice! It reminds me of a hat that Carmen Miranda would be proud to wear! 😀
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Thanks, Eliza. Think it needs a banana??
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Ha, yes, and one of your mini-pineapples!
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That would be cute 🥰
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Ooh, there is so much to feast the eyes on this week. The palm stems with the berries are quite striking – have never seen anything quite like that before. Love the Heliconia and stripy leaves, and the trailing red bromeliad flower is pretty amazing too. 😃
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Thanks, Cathy. I like the palm stems sort of icy grey green.
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Your vase is a very tropical country arrangement.
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Yay!
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You rose well to your own challenge, Amelia – the gardenias look even brighter and whiter with their tropical friends. Hope things cool down for you, but not your vases, soon
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Thanks, Cathy. The vases will likely be hot for a while. I have to think if I could come up with a pastel vase, another challenge.
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Shall I challenge you to do so…? 😉
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I’ll give it a try!!
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👍😊
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I’d say you quite surpassed your challenge. Such a wide array of foliage and flowers just screaming take me away to the tropics….gorgeous!
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Thank you, take me away and then go back to the AC!
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While I’d love to see some rain here, I can’t imagine the combination of 90+ temperatures and the humidity that comes with copious rain. On the other hand, I can’t have your ample supply of bromeliad and Heliconia flowers either.
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True, sometimes I find SoCal heat without humidity a dream. Having spent my life in the South it might be too weird.
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It’s lovely. You can’t beat a basket for setting that special mood. I’m loving that striped foliage–so nice.
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Thanks, Susie. I rarely think of baskets as vases. The striped foliage is from a mad bromeliad that is yellow and green summer and red and green winter…
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That’s a pretty versatile bromeliad!
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Also climbs trees..
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Christmas palm supposedly lives in the Los Angeles region. If I had ever seen one, I did not recognize it. There are a few palms that I sort of dismiss as king palms because I do not know what they are. Actually, I can not distinguish between the three king palms that really are king palms. I sort of want to grow Christmas palm, but I know it would be too risky. The king palms are a bit more resilient, and even they do not like the mild frost.
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Yes I don’t think Christmas Palms would work for you..I am at the northern limit here and they don’t like cold.. pretty good house plant though..
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I only took a liking to them from pictures from Panama. I do not know if they live in San Diego. If they do not live there, they do not live in Los Angeles.
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