Summer Wildflower and Grass Floral Arrangement

Inspired this week by the weedy grasses growing in the unkempt part of the garden (the part that I don’t usually photograph and avoid thinking about until I can figure out its purpose better) I decided to make an airy, elegant, wild arrangement inspired by those grasses.

Grasses are much more difficult to arrange with - their thin, long, straight stems are difficult to insert into an arrangement, and their visual form can be jarring in most arrangements.

On the other hand, they were surprisingly refreshing and fun to work with. Drawing on a wildflower or overgrown hay meadow esthetic of the high summer, it was actually nice to not use a lot of flowers aside from a few cosmos (I’m actually kind of over the big fluffy dahlias and zinnias that are usually so endemic this time of year).

With the drought and amount of stress we’ve had over dahlias, we’re seriously reconsidering the way that we garden and grow flowers. This perhaps shows me that you may not need a lot of flowers to create beauty.

And honestly, this seems to fit so much better.

Ft. Johnsongrass, Japanese millet , aromatic lovegrass, Rhodes grass, Alkali sacaton, Sideoats grama, Wild foxtail millet , ammi majus, poppy seedpods and a few stems of cosmos ‘Purity’.