In a Vase, on Monday – Zinnias Last Hurrah

Chris Mousseau

With temperatures forecast to fall well below zero this week, we definitely know winter is coming and it’s definitely (because I snipped off the final blooms) the end of days for this year’s Zinnia crop. I also decided to enjoy indoors the final snapdragon (Antirrhinum), final popcorn plant flower spike (Cassia didymobotrya) and the final few Cleome blooms before they all wither away. All are annuals I will definitely grow again in next year’s cutting garden! So here they are in my absolutely final Monday vase that features summer flowers.

I’m experimenting with how best to photograph these vases indoors. I shot this yesterday, lying on the dining room floor (after swiffering up the dog hair…), with the vase in front of the side of the white kitchen island using ambient light from the large dining room window. I needed to raise the vase a bit so used a few of my favourite pre-internet gardening reference books – Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants (THE tree and shrub bible in North America), the New England Wildflower Society Guide to Growing and Propagating Wildflowers (THE native flower propagation bible for northeast North America), and the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (just because it’s so HUGE, like a bible).

After I took a few shots I realized the zinnia on the left was facing backwards, so I turned the vase around…

Here’s a closeup of my final few zinnias. So pretty, even as they fade away…. To see vases of cut flowers from around the world, visit Cathy’s blog – Rambling in the Garden.

18 Comments

  1. Love the zinnias! I am definitely going to grow some next year! Such a fantastic range of colours. It is tricky to find a good spot to photograph our vases. I just use the dining table each week now. It’s not ideal with light coming in from the window behind, which reflects off the table etc, but the light overall in good there and I just go with it! Seems to work OK most weeks! I wonder what we will all come up with next week, for Cathy’s IAVOM 6th anniversary, without our summer flowers. Be interesting to see! Amanda

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  2. Oh yes, the flowers don’t have to be perfect to bring us joy! 🙂 You did a good job with the photos… As daylight hours lessen I think we will all be having problems photographing our vases soon. 😉

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  3. I love all the stages of the flowers, and I smiled at your creativity in finding a way to photograph them. I used to have an inside door that refused to stay in place, and I found the one-volume Oxford dictionary served quite well as a doorstop.

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  4. I avoid photographing inside at all costs, but sometimes it’s the only way and yes, books are a great way to elevate our vases. Your zinnias look so bright – must make sure I have some orange ones for next year! I tend to scour the garden for still-flowering annuals at this time of year too – the garden is definitely running out of steam

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  5. Sorry to hear that Jack Frost is taking over. I’d planned to give my zinnias a last hurrah too but then couldn’t quite bring myself to cut them all down. That’s coming, though, even as frost isn’t generally an issue in my climate.

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