Welcome to this weeks ‘In A Vase On Monday’ when, as usual, I am linking up with Cathy at Rambling In The Garden to join in with her challenge to find something from the garden to put into a vase every week.

First this week I must start with an apology – the last few weeks have rushed by far to quickly and I am very sorry that I am behind both on answering your lovely comments and on posting my promised photos of Petersham Nursery. We are back from our holidays now, so I promise I will be catching up this week!

Flowerwise all the late summer beauties are coming into their own in the Cutting Garden this week. There are dahlias, zinnias, rudbeckia, cosmos in shades from pure white to dark cranberry, a lovely grass called Panicum elegans ‘Frosted Explosion’ and the first of the gladioli. All this and the roses are starting to bloom again – it would be sheer bliss if the beds had not become overrun with weeds and annuals that have gone over whilst I have been gallivanting about on holiday!

This week I wanted to create some late summer drama making use of the lovely foliage plants which are looking so good at the moment, as well as showcasing the first Cafe Au Lait dahlia of the season!

Amaranthus-and-Grasses

I picked this rusty urn to act as a vase this week. It is one of a pair that I bought in a house sale last spring, but which I keep forgetting to make use of. The foliage that is dropping down is Amaranthus caudatus ‘Viridis’ and the grass floating above the arrangement is Panicum elegans ‘Frosted Explosion’. The seeds for both came from Sarah Raven and were started in the greenhouse back in March. I will show you pictures of both plants growing in the garden in my Cutting Garden review on Friday.

The feature flowers are the white David Austin rose William and Catherine and my very first Cafe Au Lait dahlia of the season. If you decide to try Cafe Au Lait for yourself be warned that it is very slow to come into flower. The other dahlias have been flowering for a few weeks now but this one is just starting. I also added a few heads of sedum and some springs of the annual blue clary Salvia viridis (also from Sarah Raven) to fill things out a bit more.

Amaranthus-and-Grasses

Amaranthus-and-Grasses

Amaranthus-and-Grasses Amaranthus-and-Grasses Amaranthus-and-Grasses

To help support this arrangement, I used my trick of pushing a ball of chicken wire into the top of the container so that all the stems can be fed through the wire and into the water.

Amaranthus-and-Grasses

I have some free time this week, so I was hoping to get outside and tidy up the Cutting Garden before taking photographs for Friday’s review, but we look set for a very wet week so I might have to confine myself to indoor gardening in the form of ordering my bulbs and seeds for autumn sowing. I have started making a list of what I plan to sow in late September and will be posting about that later next week.

As September is such a good time for new beginnings, I am also planning to start two new series next month. On the first of every month I am going to share with you the things that I will be looking forward too in the month to come – anything from the weather, the food or flowers to what I will reading or where I will be traveling – just a list of my seasonal inspirations. I am also conscious that I have not talked much about my vegetable garden for a while. I have had a good growing season so far and am cautiously optimistic that a pattern is developing that I can write about, so from September on the second Friday of the month I will be sharing what I am sowing, planting out and harvesting. I will continue with my regular posts – Jobs To Do on the first Wednesday, the Greenhouse Review on the second Wednesday and the Cutting Garden Review on the last Friday of each month.

Thank you as always to Cathy for encouraging us to get out in our gardens and bring a little of the outside joy inside – I hope you will pop over to her blog to see what she and the others have been cutting this week.