Who doesn’t love a fresh bouquet of flowers or a vibrant, flowering arrangement? This time of year you’d be hard pressed to find any sort of blooming flower in the Northwest, at least one that wasn’t grown in a greenhouse or flown from another country. So we decided to make, as the saying goes, lemonade out of a whole bag of lemons.

It wasn’t difficult to find armloads of natural “stuff” but the question was: what to do with it? A good trick to remember is that anything ordinary, such as a pile of fallen leaves, can look beautifully modern when arranged en masse. Raid your home for a container (don’t forget to look at a consignment store for some cheap finds) and let your inner florist take over. In the photos you’ll see that no serious arranging was done; just a nice container and some dried yard debris. Rocks, sticks and other fallen items like acorns can also be great vase fillers.

Some practical advice:

• Don’t cut or take anything without permission from the property owner.
• Rinse leaves and sticks to remove unwanted dirt and bugs.
• For curly leaves just let them air dry. For flat leaves, place single leaves between sheets of newspaper and pile on some heavy books. Let dry inside for a day or so then remove.

Photos taken by author. Natural items shown were taken from author’s yard with her own permission.