Our second morning at Chalk Hill with Ariella was spent harvesting the most spectacular blue and purple clematis flowers along with buckets and buckets of amazing foliages, garden roses, rambling roses and scented vines from the fields. We needed a lot of material to build two separate compote arrangements, one large and one small, slotted for later that day.
The fields, the flowers, the company…. it was just too much to handle. What an incredible experience!
To my excitement, Sarah Winward from Honey of a Thousand Flowers was attending the workshop too. She is as sweet and beautiful as can be and was an absolute treat to spend time with!
Her darling little baby Ivy and husband David were in tow and we all oohed and ahhhhed our way through dinner with them that evening. Hands down, cutest family ever!
In the smaller compotes with played with really bright, bold colors. Red, yellow and orange flowers paired with the deep colored foliage of variegated beech, cherries on the branch and this awesome coral passion vine.
For the second compote of the day, we went big! There were large flowered clematis in many shades of blue and purple, white rambling rose branches, hyacinths, scillia, olive foliage with the fruit still attached, muscarri, honeysuckle vines, eleagnus foliage, inky bearded iris, snowball viburnum, clematis recta and mockorange. They were beautiful and smelled like heaven!
Learning the magic art of compote construction was awesome and a bit challenging for us all. For many, this was their first introduction to working with flower frogs and until you get the hang of it, frogs can be quite tricky. To make things even trickier, the sticking agent used to hold the frogs in place was defective and kept unsticking. A little unnerving indeed!
As you can see I got a little carried away with mine!!! Haha, what fun!!!
** Part three up next, along with my visit to Garden Valley Ranch.
Also, I shared my monster bouquet from day one on The Seasonal Bouquet Project this week.
sarah on
that last photo of you is so good.