In a Vase, on Monday – Thanksgiving

Chris Mousseau

It’s Thanksgiving Day here in Canada and where I live it’s a bit chilly right now (9 Celsius, 42 Fahrenheit), very grey, windy, and raining. A fairly typical October day although when I think back to just a week ago, when it was 24 and sunny, it seems the leap to autumn has been quite sudden. I’m glad I gathered flowers for today’s vases a few days ago!

To start, an amuse bouche. Someone was throwing away a few glass containers; possibly designed as condiment and salt and pepper jars, I like the rippled sides so brought them home. They’re the perfect size for Gaillardia, Blanket Flowers, that I’ll be bringing to a friend later today for our Thanksgiving meal. I even have a prop this week – something Cathy at Rambling in the Garden, who hosts this weekly gathering of cut flowers in vases, is very fond of!

My centrepiece vase started last Thursday, when I went out in the morning to discover one of my Zinnias had toppled – either from wind or chipmunk, and I needed to save the 10 or 12 blooms.

It was a great opportunity, I thought, to use my second new frog. This one is heavy clear glass that’s meant to sit at the bottom of a vessel (the other is green, for the top of a vase) and I thought it, plus the flowers, would look interesting in a squat square clear glass container.

I discovered that the holes in the frog are deceivingly large and I needed to put a few stems into each one to make the flower stems sit nicely.

Which meant cutting a few other Zinnias, as well as my second to last gladiola stem, plus some of the now abundantly flowering dahlias. Here is that first vase, on Thursday:

I noticed yesterday that some of the original flowers were fading, and the vase as a whole seemed a bit sparse and uneven, so I pulled it apart, re-sized the stems, added a bunch of new dahlias and a few more zinnias, and came up with the final look. Although the gladiola is a bit too pastel for this Thanksgiving vase the other colours are quite autumnal I think. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

31 Comments

  3. Happy Thanksgiving! And I must say, happy vase as well. Especially in the cropped photo at the top, it reminds me of a Dutch still life. From that perspective, the single gladiola serves as the sort of accent those painters usually provided with shells, nuts, or even a bit of game, like a pheasant. I really like all of the photos.

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  4. Happy Thanksgiving to you & other Canadians! Those little jars are a bonus. I’ve picked up 7 vases during the last few years…just plopped on top of recyclable bottles. Most recent was small, round, w/ glass waves on the top. That frog is handy…your flowers are so colorful. Have you ever grown Angelonia…very hardy…still blooming here. It was 44° this am…beautiful day.

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  5. Your thrownaway aquisitions look really useful and the gaillardia and cheeky candleholder make for a fun tableau 👍 Your eclectic mix of dahlias and zinnia works well with the new frog and cubic vase, and I tend to agree with Shoreacres about the gladiolus acting as a kind of accent

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  7. I do need to invest in a couple of glass frogs. The centerpiece is lovely. I love that you have Thanksgiving early. Ours is too close to Christmas making it hard to enjoy the festive season. The last vase is gorgeous. A perfect mix of the late season garden.

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      1. Chris, I just planted Dahlias stored with your plastic wrap method. Put them in the fridge. It worked out great. A tiny bit of mold that I cut off – I think from my leaving them at room temp too long.

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      2. Wow! That’s Great!! I’m so happy it worked for you!!! Looking forward to seeing your flowers – I’m on the cusp of digging my tubers out of the ground and storing them for the winter…

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      3. I am very intrigued by this. The last time I tried Dahlias in the ground it was a disaster. It seems the chilling might help? Though here you are supposed to cut them down for summer, seems so weird. Of course I lost all the tags.

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  11. Nice job with the arrangement Chris! Just lovely. I find my dahlias aren’t lasting as long in a vase as I think they should. Reworking the vases helped and reducing the stem length in this case was a good idea. Makes the flowers relate to the vase rather than sticking out of it. You’ve had an excellent number of beautiful flowers this summer/fall.

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    1. Thank you!! I’ve learned that Dahlias will last longer, when cut, if you cut them above a joint/node, where the stem forked off, if that makes any kind of visual sense. I’ve also learned that there’s no shame in pulling a vase apart and starting fresh!

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  12. Happy belated Thanksgiving! That last picture especially looks so cool, with the way the frog makes everything fan out! Love the mix of colors, too. And the little jars with the gaillardia are so breezy and cheerful 😀

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