Fall Arrangement with Foliage + Monday Morning Blooms

Celebrate the beauty of fall with an arrangement of foliage, pods and grasses, all gathered from the great outdoors. This easy arrangement adds some natural beauty and an organic touch of fall to your home, without the expense of buying flowers.

Happy Monday! We had a break from the heat over the weekend and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ve said goodbye to the 90s until next summer! Today I’m joining my blogging friends for some flower therapy and Monday Morning Blooms with a touch of fall. You can find my friends’ links to their floral inspiration at the bottom of this post.

Our theme for this week’s edition of Monday Morning Blooms was creating an arrangement using foliage or greenery that was free-for-the-clipping! As the leaves on the trees have yet to turn with our summer-like temperatures here in North Carolina, I went foraging to see what I could harvest to create a seasonal arrangement appropriate for early October.

I started with a favorite urn from my retail days that has a bird relief. For easy arranging, I used a piece of chicken wire tucked in the vase and then added my water. As some of the stems were top heavy, I added some waterproof floral tape to the top of the urn, so the chicken wire would stay tucked down inside the urn when adding the weighty stems.

I cut some green seed pods from the Crepe Myrtles. Before using them in an arrangement, I like to give them a dunk and a gentle “swish” in a bucket of water, taking care so as not lose too many seed pods, while removing any remaining dried petal remnants, cobwebs and critters that might be hiding among the clusters.

 I struck gold while foraging for greenery, finding these prickly pods growing on a tree in the field next to my Potting Shed.

I loved the texture and color and had never seen them before, so I cut a few branches and did an online search, identifying them as the pods from a Chinese Chestnut Tree. I would have never guessed these prickly pods held a chestnut inside!

Whenever I use woody stems like live tree branches in an arrangement, I like to strip a few inches of the outer layer of wood from the branch using a vegetable peeler, which helps them ‘drink’ and stay fresh longer.

Maiden grass plumes, goldenrod and clippings from our Golden Euonymus shrubs were added to fill in the arrangement.

I placed the finished arrangement in the center of a grapevine wreath, surrounding it with a few harbingers of fall. . .

Pumpkins, Indian corn, leaves and dried hydrangeas.

Adding a bird’s nest to the arrangement seemed fitting . . .

To pair with the urn as a fall nesting touch.

 Goldenrod blooms along the roadside and in fields from August through October here in North Carolina. I had several bee visitors while I was photographing, attracted to the goldenrod in the arrangement. . .

 Goldenrod is an important late-season source of nectar for pollinators. It often gets a bad rap and takes the blame as the source of hay fever in late summer and early fall, when ragweed pollen is actually the culprit, which blooms at the same time.

 Ragweed flowers don’t contain nectar so it’s dependent on the wind to transfer the small, lightweight pollen grains. Ragweed pollen has been recorded 2 miles up in the atmosphere and found 400 miles out at sea. According to WebMD, about 1 out of 5 people have a reaction to ragweed pollen. A single ragweed plant is capable of producing over a billion pollen grains. . .*achoo*!

When using an arrangement with fall grasses and goldenrod indoors, give them a spritz of aerosol hair spray to keep the grasses and tiny flower clusters from shedding.

*Buzz* over to visit my talented blogging friends to see their blooming inspiration this week:

Lidy at FrenchGardenHouse

Pam at Everyday Living

Our sweet friend Shirley at Housepitality Designs is taking a break. Please send some love and prayers her way. ♥

“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”

~ Jim Bishop

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