365 Days of Ikebana-Day 47

My starting point for today’s arrangement was a long, low ceramic contianer that I received as a gift from my partner Frederick. Several ideas went thru my head, and I settled on one in particular. I had wanted to do a hana kubari (a natural means of supporting flowers) and I wanted to expand on a smaller arrangment I made a few years ago. To do this I needed to gather magnolia leaves, a lot of them, in fact I gathered 100 of them! Then I started threading each one on a bamboo skewer. They are all facing the same direction and I put them on one by one and then inserted another bamboo skewer about two inches below the first one. This formed my basis for the design, and I gathered materials to make an airy arrangement that I wanted to look like a meadow. Some various grasses were cut, and hyssop, flox, garlic flowers, blackberry lily, and orange bulbine frutescens. Each stem was inserted into the hana kubari made of the magnolia leaves until I had filled up the design. I really wanted it to look like a small meadow, and I think I succeeded.