Hello all,

At our recent Ikebana International meeting Lucy was the demonstrator. She used a piece of dried bamboo from which she removed a strip, thus opening up the cavity and allowing for materials to be placed inside.

Lucy showed us first the naturalistic arrangement, below, where she used a leukadendron salignum and clivia leaves and placed the strip of bamboo she had removed, back into the arrangement.

Then she disassembled the arrangement and created the more modern piece by placing one long sansevieria trifasciata (mother-in-law's tongue), a small piece of amaranthus and some coloured wisteria.

For my contribution at the meeting I used two doryanthes palmeri leaves and viburnum opulus in a modern arrangement.

As always, please go to our website for more information and photographs.

For class last week, we had another opportunity to run a workshop with material of which we had abundance. This time Vicky had to prune back her nandina domestica and offered to bring some for all of us. Below are my examples of different ways to use this versatile material.

Here I removed half of the leaves of each stem to give this divided look 

In two glass containers, a leaf stem and berries

Here I used only the nandina flower
clusters while still in bud and calla lilies

Unfortunately, only two of the senior students attended class last week and here are their pieces:

Lucy Papas

Lucy Papas

Vicky Kalokathis
Sorry about the quality of the photo but I felt the
arrangement was too interesting to omit.

I leave you with the two different versions of the arrangement below. I created the first because I didn't want to throw away this rather aging cymbidium orchid, which needed some support. When it finally died, I created the second using the doryanthus palmeri leaves and one calla lily.

Bye for now,

Emily