The square container has been ‘hot’ now in floral design for a good 6 years!  Clear glass squares, tinted glass, or ceramic are popular for today’s tablescapes for many occasions.  Along with popular shapes comes popular wire trends!  Shown here is hot pink round wire, 25 gauge , used to mirror the shape of the black tai leaf.  Try putting the pink protea exotic bloom on an angle like this! Pink motsumatos are peeking out from the base of the design and that soft reindeer moss fills in the gaps to hide mechanics.  Have you seen the reindeer moss in all the different colors it comes in now? Let’s face it – lime green doesn’t go with EVERY arrangement- so now we have even more choices to consider when completing our fresh flower tablescapes.

*Thanks to Eloise Gurski Branden for the great pic!

From the early morning sunshine to the beautiful sunsets over the Pacific,  California has proven to be an amazing place of a more ‘chilled out’ pace.  We have been exploring this Carlsbad / San Diego area for the past 3 days and this Jersey Girl is blown away by the textures of palms against a cool blue sky as well as all the succulents covering the ground.  I have never seen Birds of Paradise growing like weeds and still consider them to be the exotic flower worthy of the $5.00 each or more tag we place on them in our Jersey Flower Shops!  Yesterday we explored the infamous San Diego Zoo, and although the animals were so much fun to watch, I kept finding myself drawn to the alien like botanicals all over!  Our  guide mentioned that Dr. Seuss and his wife visited the Zoo often and he actually found inspiration there for some of his wild illustrations he used in his famous books.  Seriously, the Dr. Seuss books always left me unsettled, and I’m not sure the crazy REAL botanicals I saw yesterday didn’t leave me unsettled,  but it was an amazing experience to SEE them and TOUCH them, ( the ones that didn’t have thorns anyway : )  On to more California adventure…