In the garden: Nature provides bouquet material

Colleen Slater

guest columnist

Chris Frutiger of Gig Harbor collects flowers, foliage, branches, seedpods and whatever else she can find in her yard and garden for beautiful bouquets to decorate her home, regardless of the season.

“It’s all organic,” she says, including four little goats that add to their fertilizer.

Frutiger says the diversity of her plantings and encouragement of birds for insect control help her maintain a large garden of flowers and edibles without chemicals of any kind on her acreage. She uses oyster shells around special plantings for slug control and ammonia water to squirt those she finds feasting on her plants.

She replaced some of her lawn with creeping thyme for easier maintenance. The tiny blooms are a plus to a “green lawn.”

At this season, she still has a few flowers in bloom, like dahlias, lavatera, cosmos, Rudbeckia, coreopsis, heather, chamomile, feverfew and a special favorite — the dark burgundy Autumn Joy sedum.

“I cut back the feverfew in the summer so it will be available for fall bloom,” she says. “I always like white in my bouquets.”

Variegated and gray foliage are used as a contrast to the greens of huckleberry and salal. A favorite spirea has green and cream leaves.

Lambs ears and dusty miller are good plants with gray leaves.

Hydrangea foliage is good for fall bouquets, as well as the familiar maples and other shrubs with red, orange and yellow leaves.

Dried hydrangea flowers are sometimes used in fall bouquets, too. She also likes scented geranium leaves.

Hansa, a shrub rose that makes a good cut flower, also has great fall foliage.

Frutiger cuts off rose thorns when she uses them, and she doesn’t like regular holly for bouquets, even though the berries look so good. She gives many bouquets to friends, and some small local businesses benefit from her talent, too.

She doesn’t want anyone to be hurt while handling the bouquets.

She’s also careful about what plants are used if a home has small children or indoor pets. Some colorful berries are poisonous, so those are a no-no where children may be.

She does use berries, including huckleberries, cranberries and wintergreen, in a clear vase for added color for the holiday season.

Rudbeckia and crocosmia seed heads are great ones to use in fall arrangements.

Beginning in the fall and carrying until spring blooms are available, Frutiger uses dried seedpods, bare branches or those with lichen covering them. She especially likes the limey-green lichen for holiday bouquets, as it adds a good color contrast.

An evergreen rockrose with soft blue-gray silvery foliage is a good addition to her holiday displays.

From fall until the end of December, Frutiger uses coned evergreens and red berries in most of her bouquets. Cotoneaster tarneys is loaded with berries that turn redder as temperatures drop.

Fir, pine and hemlock all provide cones. She likes to drape branches with cones over the edge of a vase and use sprigs of cones in place of a bow.

Prairiefire crabapple holds red fruits up to half an inch until the birds clean them up in the winter.

Snowberries add the essential white for holiday arrangements.

For festive occasions, she may use gold or silver glitter spray on some salal in a bouquet.

Frutiger has taken no classes in floral arrangement; she says she does “nothing formal” with her vases of colorful décor.

Except for such things as glitter spray or cranberries, she gathers all of her arrangement material from her own property.

“Nature has so much to share,” she says, “You don’t need to buy.”

In the Garden columnist Colleen Slater can be reached by e-mail at cas4936@centurytel.net.