Amalgamation of Inspiration

My sister Sue is the crafty one. She got me started hand-sewing our own dresses and clothes from organic cotton, Alabama Chanin-style. I got her gardening.

She started from scratch in the backyard of her Richmond home. A grass wasteland, she put down cardboard, added lots of soil and began a “no dig” cut-flower garden a couple years ago. One of her ‘surprise’ superstars has been “Flaming flamingo” celosia seeds that reseeded themselves and now grow 6’ tall. They’ve spread around much of her back yard and even into the gravel. What to do with all these pretty lavender-pink blooms?

Make little bundles!

The flowers have a cool grey to pink variation so she harvested the last 2 foot or so at different stages to have more color interest. Then came stripping the stalks of leaves – which she said turned her fingers brown because she doesn’t like to wear gloves. Wrapping 15-20 stalks together and securing with a rubber band, she then hung them upside-down to dry for a couple weeks. In the process little shiny, black seeds fell all over her dining room table, so she recommends you put a cloth down or something if you want to harvest seeds.

Her next epiphany came while driving from her house in Richmond to a vacation home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The roadsides in Virginia are covered with a tall, blanket of Kudzu vines. Imported from Asia in 1876 as a possible erosion-control solution, this vine literally covers trees, bushes and anything in its way. Always the naturalist, Sue looked online and found that many artisans use the vines to create baskets and wreaths. Nancybasket.com was a jack-pot of inspiration, so Sue pulled over to harvest some of these noxious vines that covers much of the roadside trees in our area.

She had hoped the Kudzu vines would pull off in long lines, but found the plant broke apart easily and ended up with 8’ lengths that she then wound together into cute, slender green wreaths.

It didn’t take long to meld these two components together – wala! She simply wound the bundles onto the wreath with green floral wire and made a beautiful, feathery wreath that now graces her front door.

I admire her creativity. And especially her use of natural materials in a sustainable way. So much of modern culture relies on ordering decorations and seasonable items from online sources. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s going to bury our world in packaging material and silly plastic soulless gratification.

And besides: what do you learn? what do you achieve? what do you throw away? Let’s all take a clue from Sue: (To see her wreath, click here)

Rethink, reduce, reuse, and Rejoice

BONUS - Sue has lots of seeds she's gathered, let me know and I'll get some to you!