A February Wedding

A February Wedding

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We were thrilled to be able to provide flowers for this beautiful February wedding.  The bride wore a gorgeous vintage dress and the colours for the bridesmaids were apricot, peach and orange.  

Pink Ice Protea and Fountain Pincushions were the main flowers.  The Fountain are a later flowering pincushion and are at their height in January and early February.  They have a soft purplish tinge when they first begin to flower so they really went well with the apricot and peach colours.  I added some bright pink Kangaroo Paw, Brunia Albiflora, some gorgeous purplish silver eucalyptus foliage and some blue green conifer foliage.  As a highlight, I added some gorgeous summer grass seed heads.  The bouquet was bound with jute ribbon and I added a bow which was removable.  The bride opted for removing the bow and I think it really worked.  The colours worked so well with her stunning ivory coloured vintage dress.

Photo by KS Photography

For the bridesmaids, I used Pink Ice Protea, Brunia Albiflora, Pink Kangaroo Paw, Geraldton Wax and  more of the native foliage.  Each of the bridesmaids dresses were different - all variations on the vintage theme so keeping their bouquets all the same was important.

Grevillea foliage, and the same blue green conifer foliage also tie the bouquets together, with the summer grass highlights also added.  Again, the bows were removable.  

In keeping with the idea of the different bridesmaids dresses, the bride decided that the boutonniere should all be different.  What fun!  Using different combinations of the flowers and foliage from the bouquets, I created the button holes to be all different, but "matching".  

The groom's boutonniere stood out by being slightly larger.  You can see a dried leucadendron cone, single Brunia Albiflora, Kangaroo Paw, Banksia, conifer foliage and summer grass.

And lastly, the corsage for the Mother of the Bride - a combination of Kangaraoo Paw, Grevillea, Wax flower, foliage and summer grass.  

Photo by KS Photographers

The photographers for the wedding took this beautiful photo of the brides bouquet.  KS Photographers have won the Tasmanian Wedding Photographer of the Year for 2014 and their website is well worth a look.  They are so creative and their catalogue is stunning.  

Photo by KS Photographers

It was such a treat to work on this wedding!  And so nice to see some photos of the day taken by such a great photographer!  

A January Wedding

A January Wedding

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Summer in Tasmania is a popular time for weddings.  The days are long and lazy, with daylight savings and the twilight giving beautiful lingering light until almost 10 pm.  Over summer 2013-14 I did a number of weddings and so I thought I'd share some of the highlights.  

An early January wedding, had an Australian theme with lots of colour.  "Orange, red and yellow" were the colours chosen, so I used the gorgeous range of summery Pincushions.  The varieties were "Scarlet Ribbons" for the red, "Mardis Gras" for the yellow and a Cordifolium hybrid for the orange.  

For the bride's bouquet, I teamed them with gorgeous Risdon Peppermint foliage, Geraldton Wax and the lovely Leucadendron Pisa with its cheery yellow bracts and silvery green cones.  Some Leucadendron Christmas Cones and a few Leucadendron Safari Sunset were added for a bit of red, and for to highlight the Australian theme, gorgeous dried gum nuts.  

The grooms boutonniere carried the Australian theme with a gum nut too.  Colour was more subdued but matched the bride with the use of the yellow Leucadendron Pisa and a red Christmas Cone.  Tasmanian Myrtle foliage and some popular Button Bush or Berzelia completed the arrangement.  I used jute twine to provide the rustic, country style but added a highlight with a ribbon matching the brides dress.

For the bridal table at the reception, a big splash of colour.  The fresh smell of the eucalyptus and the honey of the Geraldton Wax would have added to the atmosphere. 

Each table at the reception also carried the bright summery colours.  White ceramic pots allowed the foliage and colours to make a real statement.  

Summer is a great time to go wild with colour!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

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Can you believe we are saying goodbye to 2013?  The year seems to have flown by so fast and the Christmas Season has been so busy that I have hardly come up for air!  In Tasmania the long summer days linger and the summer solstice occurs just before Christmas.  It's a lovely time of year.  

The main flower we're harvesting now is the Leucospermum, commonly known as a Pincushion.  Its beautiful summer colours provide inspiration for me when it comes to festive decorations.  I love fresh Christmas wreaths.  They make great table centrepieces, especially with a candle in the middle.  

I love the challenge of combining colours and textures to create these wreaths.  Foliage plays a big part in the overall feel of the wreath and its fun foraging around the farm for beautiful fresh foliage to use.

I love the wreath above using some late Tasmanian Waratah and button bush or Berzelia.  I've also used some Dryandra Formosa, an Australian flower from the protea family that I did a test plant of a few years ago.  The golden flowers are surrounded by lovely foliage that looks like strips of green zig zag.  Dryandra flowers dry well too and last for years in a dried arrangement.

During spring I noticed a wonderful eucalypt in my local area that was laden with gum nuts.  So heavily laden was it that the branches were weighed down to the ground.  I snipped a few branches and dried them, looking forward to when I could use them.  They were a perfect addition to this wreath, I thought!

Orange Leucospermums and yellow Leucadendron Pisa make this wreath really summery and fresh.  The Pisa can be used at various stages.  I picked some quite early to use it in its flowering stage.  Later the central cone enlarges.   It is silvery green and beautifully surround by yellow and lime green bracts.  

Geraldton Wax flowers and Leucadendron Jubilee Crown, also known as Christmas Cones fill out the bright citrusy wreath.  I couldn't resist adding some more gum nuts!

Foraging around the farm lead me to seek out a small holly bush that had been overgrown in the last two years.  After a bit of bush-bashing, accompanied by my trusty sidekick, I found the bush and was delighted to discover that it had grown significantly, even though it had been almost hidden by bushy growth.  Needless to say I've now cleared around it.  The holly was fun to play with in wreaths and Christmas bunches too, although it was a little prickly to deal with. 

I also found, during one of my foraging walks, some impressive cones on a big conifer our family imaginatively calls the Christmas Tree!  When I first started doing the local farmer's market I was excited to use some foliage I found which had pink immature cones on it.  These are the same cones a couple of months later.  I really don't remember this tree producing such impressive cones before! The photo doesn't do them justice - they are shiny and deep purple.  Wonderful for an addition to a Christmas wreath!!

I saved them for my own Christmas wreath.  I added Leucaspermum Scarlet Ribbons, some wild foraged Ozothamnus (white Rice Flower)  Tasmanian Myrtle foliage, Leucadendron Safari Sunset, Christmas Cones, and Goldstrike, and of course, some of the gum nuts.  Knowing it was my own wreath I probably tried to pack too many things onto the one wreath, but I'm glad I made the time to make a wreath for our own table.

It was a beautiful summer day in Tasmania on December 25th.  We had Christmas brunch on the deck in the open air.

It was a memorable day.  As I write this, the wreath is still relatively fresh and sitting on the table beside me.  I love to enjoy the flowers I grow in my own home!

I'm looking forward to 2014 - it promises to be a very exciting year.  In the meantime, we are still working to pick the rest of the summer crops as they bloom.  I'm looking forward to doing some wedding flowers this week, and then maybe getting a short break toward the end of January before the year really begins in earnest.  I hope 2014 is happy one for you - enjoy!!

Farewell until next year.

What's in the Basket

What's in the Basket

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Spring went by in a flash here.  And just as summer arrived, so did the pincushions or Leucospermums.  I love these beautiful flowers from the protea family for the range of cheery summer colours that they offer.  In the basket this week was the first real harvest of some newly planted pincushions called Leucospermum Scarlet Ribbons.  The plants are not quite 3 years old and are starting to flower really well now.  It looks like summer in a basket to me!

The Scarlet Ribbons start off with a slightly pink/purple tinge due to the hairs on the sheaf that contains the "pin".  As the pins emerge the overall colour impression changes.  The spines are a salmon pink and the sheaths curl to reveal a scarlet interior.  Then as the flower ages, it becomes more intensely red.

I love the summery colours of pincushions.  There are 3 varieties in this shot of my picking trailer.  Don't they remind you of gelato flavours?  Raspberry, mango and tangerine! 

Welcome to The Swallows Nest

Welcome to The Swallows Nest

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Welcome to our blog. We live on the Tasman Peninsula in South-Eastern Tasmania. We grow Proteas and Australian Native flowers. We are passionate about our flowers and we want to share them with you. This blog is a way of documenting the different flowers we grow, and the different blooms available as the seasons change throughout the year. We hope you enjoy them, as much as we do!

January is warm in Tasmania, but we are blessed with the ability to produce flowers that many on the mainland are unable to grow at this time of year. At the moment, we have some beautiful late flowering Leucospermums in bloom. They are commonly known as pincushions or tiaras. They are a protea native to South Africa. The variety that is at its peak in January is called Fountain and is a beautiful pinkish orange with purplish dots on the ends of the unfurled fronds. The centre of the flower head is a beautiful glowing greenish white. They are lovely in a mixed bunch or en masse! These little beauties have only been in the ground for two years and this year is our first harvest. We look forward to having these as a regular part of our summer stock.