This was a custom order for Kavita, who saw a photo of some pansies I posted and asked if I could do book ends with them. I hesitated for a moment, because I usually press pansies flat, and I’ve been using more dimensional flowers for the bookends, since they have a lot of depth.
But then I thought it might be cool if I poured a few layers of flat pansies, so that it’d give some sense of depth (and better mimic how they look when they’re growing too).
Pretty happy with the end result, although I think if I did it again, I might pour each of the pansy layers (there are three) a little thicker, with less of a clear layer between them and the gold flake layer. Maybe? Do you think that would be better?
Well, regardless, I do think they came out nicely, and hopefully Kavita will love them. 🙂
Feel free to ask about custom orders — I’m happy to consider, though it’s subject to what’s growing in my garden, what flowers preserve well, etc.
I suppose I might be willing to order dried flowers to use in this kind of thing (if someone desperately wants a peony table in December, for example), but it would make the pieces cost more if I had to buy the flower material. And at least in the spring / summer, just keeping up with the changing flowers in my perennial garden is probably plenty of material I want to work with.
It really helps my ADD need for novelty to maintain interest; I suppose that’s part of why I love having a perennial garden too. Every few days, it changes.
I was trying to explain this kind of perennial gardening to someone, comparing it to a garden that’s mostly long-blooming annuals or, in a tropical climate, long-blooming perennials. The best analogy I’ve come up for so far is that my kind of garden is more dynamic, like a movie, and the other kind is more static, like a painting. Both can be beautiful, of course.
But my garden requests a certain amount of continuous attention for full appreciation — blink, and you’ll miss it. Peonies are almost done blooming — just a few more days, I think.
