In a Vase on Monday | 4th September 2023

A little shoutout before I begin — the lovely Rosie Amber featured my garden in her “Enchanting Gardens” series yesterday! It was really fun to babble for a bit about what we’re doing out here and it’s even more fun to dig into the rest of the posts and hear about everyone else. So if you want a peek at where all these flowers are coming from, that’s the place to look.

This week’s post is more a redux of last week than anything new. Mostly the same flowers blooming and I’m just changing out old sprigs for new to keep the same vases going. The main reason I’m posting at all is because I said I would come back with some pictures of blooms that hadn’t opened yet. So here they are!

‘Holland Festival’, close to fully opened, is gorgeous and everything I could have hoped for in my first successful dinner plate dahlia. I’m definitely going to propogate some more of these big ones next spring so that I can put together an entire arrangement of them. Also, there’s that purple hollyhock I mentioned last time.

Those double lilies (I’ve heard them called rose lilies?) I mentioned last time finally opened enough to be recognizable as such. They seem to take longer to unfurl than normal lilies, and the inside petals never actually open at all. Which means they’re pollenless, which is a huge plus.

Gratuitous extra lily pictures, because it might feel like I’m taking too many now, but I know that I’ll be looking back through them all winter to remind myself why I keep doing this gardening thing.

This is a post for Rambling in the Garden‘s In a Vase on Monday meme!

8 thoughts on “In a Vase on Monday | 4th September 2023”

  2. Thanks for sharing Rosie Amber’s interview about you and your garden, Angela. I knew you had SoCal roots and were living in Europe but I didn’t realize you were in Finland. My ancestry is Finnish and Swedish – my maternal grandparents immigrated to the US from Finland and my paternal grandparents from Sweden – so posts relating to either country (neither of which I’ve had the opportunity to visit in person) are always interesting.

    Your Monday vase is beautiful – the burgundy hollyhock does a nice job of bringing out the deeper tones within the dahlia. The rose lilies are fabulous. I’ve seen them advertised in catalogs but haven’t (yet) purchased any of the bulbs. Success with lilies here has been dicey in the past but I’ve had some luck with those in the Orienpet classification recently so I’ve feeling more adventurous about trying others 😉

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    1. Oh gosh, that’s so cool! Not only a SoCal buddy but a Finnish one too! If you ever have the chance to come out this way some day, you should definitely give me a holler so I can drag you around all the botanical gardens 😀 Some of my husband’s family immigrated to the States, but they stayed mainly in the Great Lakes region where the population is huge. We did meet random Finns here and there (usually when you’d catch a snatch of conversation and whip around because what are the chances anyone would be speaking in THAT language) while living out there and it was always fun.

      Yes, I think some lilies are just possible, though you have to baby them a bit. I’d think containers with reservoirs and maybe a place with afternoon shade would do the trick. And popping them in the fridge over winter, of course! The only annoying part about the rose lilies, I’ve found, is that the smaller buds don’t always open all the way in the vase if you cut them at the early point you would for normal lilies. I’m still experimenting to see what will result in the best vase life for them but it might involve waiting until the first is fully open or even ready to remove.

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    1. Agreed, and it’s all part of that community feeling that makes things so much more fun. The more you find out, the more you find things in common. Also, I don’t know anywhere else that would appreciate my bad plant puns lol

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