Fall Flower Market

As much as I love summer with all its warm breezes and good times with family and friends on boats and beaches, fall has it's own amazing attributes in color, food, football and flowers. And there's nothing like going to the flower market and my favorite place there, Chester Brown www.chesterbrown.com, to soak in all the seasonal flowers and other goodies for sale.

This sight always makes my heart skip a beat

Coastal Heaven

 Who you looking at?

I think I'll name him "George"

So to prepare for an impromptu get-together, and to grab flowers for my last garden club luncheon for the season (it's only a summer garden club, which to me, is perfect!), I ventured into Boston and picked up some dahlias in three colors, some bunny tail grass (don't you love that name?), some echinops AKA thistle, and some astranthia, the pretty smaller pink flowers.

Here comes Peter Cottontail... 

 LOVE the purpley-blue

Then I marched over to my favorite container store to grab hanging votive candle holders that I thought would be perfect vases. A lot of garden stores sell things like these or you can find them online.

 Since the vases were short, I trimmed the dahlia close to the top

I saved the leaves and trimmed the stem close 

to the leaves to use as my base

Don't be afraid to smush the dahlia down in the vase 

to cover the trimmed stem

I held the bunny grass next to the vase to make sure how long I needed it

Tada! Here's the final version. Now onto other color combos!

The foliage was mostly rotten so I didn't use any of it. I just snipped the blooms to use alone.

Then I added the pink astrantia - I love the color combo and the star-shaped petals. Since each stem had several blossoms, I snipped the stem so the clusters were similar in height.

Looks pretty and simple with the darker contrast 

- oftentimes, simple is better.

Nothing beats blue and white - so soothing

Follow the same steps as above using snipped foliage and three dahlias

Make sure to look at all sides of your arrangement if it'll be seen from all angles and have some blooms facing in all directions.

The addition of the thistle really sets the white off!

Now for table fun...

After the market, I thought about the tabletop and went to Michael's and picked up some cork board tiles with a chevron pattern, thinking they would look neat running down the center of the table.

Then I got out my Dartmouth plates (not in the picture but always the first used is my plate for Dick's House, the college's old infirmary just for students where I spent many a week after one of my eight knee operations), some pretty glasses that belonged to my husband's grandmother and set the table with a neutral green cloth

I mixed the three types of arrangements and clustered

 them down the center of the table

Let's eat!!