posy bottles, pixie bouquets, fairy bundles

Do you remember playing with flowers out of the garden when you were a kid? Making perfumes, or fairy rings, or the thrill when a flower was of such a small scale that it was the right size for a doll bouquet? (The best flower for this was alyssum, I remember, which was the perfect size to look like a whole bouquet for my Daisy and Sindy dolls.) I still have a real affection for things in miniature – little tea-sets, dolls dresses, tiny cactuses.

One thing I very much love about my friend Melissa’s blog TINY HAPPY is her attention to botanicals….to weeds, wild plants and things picked from the waysides. Melissa’s eye for what’s around her is so much about a beautiful quality of deep attention that she possesses. Where one person might walk across a field and not see anything of note, Melissa sees the clover, the buttercups and the flax-flowers at the field edge. It’s about being awake to the world in a heightened way. (For just a taste of her good plant-finding and appreciating eye, check out her ‘Botanicals’ set on Flickr HERE.) 

So, inspired by both Melissa and 8 year old me…

…the other day I finished up a couple of bottles of essential oil, and it occurred to me that the little brown bottles would make sweet posy vases for little blooms – the small scale bringing attention to tiny flowers which would look silly or get lost in a bigger vessel. Also, there’s something about the little brown glass bottles which seems kind of Victorian to me. So, I scrubbed the labels off the bottles and then went outside to see what I could find.

Last week I filled them with a few lilac violets and some spring-y forget-me-nots…

And this week, a daisy and some primula.

I am really enjoying playing with these miniature botanical displays…..it makes me (tiny) happy and takes me right back to my girlhood explorations in the garden.