Flowers in bloom
Containers and tools: fork hoe, carrying box, stepstool and mixing bowl
Vegetables and plants: komatsuna, Japanese radish, sweet rockets, dandelion, hakusai, blueberry and carrots
One of the interesting things with “Noh no Ikebana” is the use of vegetable flowers. They’ll give you a lovely surprise of discovering how cute the flowers of vegetables are.
They come in various colors and tones. So they are important elements of the arrangement. They can add pleasant scent, too.
When arranging flowers, we need to be careful not to let them wither. We chose containers carefully so that we can put them in water and keep them happy. In this case, I put a flowering branch of a fruit tree in a plastic bottle and placed a stepstool which is tall enough to hide the bottle.
Yoko Hamanaka, Hachioji, Tokyo
We arrange non-vegetable flowers, too, like sunflowers, plum and cherry blossoms and wild chrysanthemum. Some years ago, when my precious friend passed away, I made an arrangement for her using sunflowers with their faces looking down. Flowers can speak for us.
Main characters of this arrangement are Japanese radish with cute pale purple flowers, sweet rockets with violet flowers and komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach) and hakusai (Chinese cabbage) with happy yellow flowers. Dandelion can bloom all at once when it’s in good condition, so you can use a whole bunch to make your arrangement even brighter.