What to do, what to do

So, one of the downsides of working with plants and increasing my knowledge exponentially every shift is that the possibilities of what to buy and how to arrange it are endless. It's like being a recently-cured diabetic who wandered into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory- do I start with the chocolate fountains, or take a Gloopian ride down a candy-transporting pipe? And while I've received paycheques so far, they've all been small and the knowledge of an impending biggie looms large in my mind as I'm wandering through aisles of ornamental grasses and past rows of mosses and sempervivums.

It only gets worse from there, as my head spins when trying to decide if it's better to start from the ground up (ivies- no, they need more depth for the root system than I can provide; vinca minor- possibly, although its colour means I'm bound to matching it somewhere and periwinkle isn't the easiest colour to work with;) or from the top down (grass- what kind? Fescue- I'm allergic to its pollen; Imperata- while they're brilliantly-coloured, I might be bound by it, and also, some of their root systems go fairly deep; or maybe a tufty kind of grass which is easy to deal with, but doesn't offer much height because it only grows so high before it flops over).



Assuming I've already dealt with either the top or bottom, there's still the question of what to put in the middle. This site is bloody fantastic in giving a guide in how to fill containers with either odd- or even-numbered plants- that's the easy part. The hard part is colour-complementing and the plants to use. I saw a customer yesterday who was pairing (what I think was) a cherry black-leafed philodendron with white hyacinths and pansies and the combination was just stunning. So, that gave me an idea- red, black, and white (with maybe a couple of plants in each colour group) would produce a wow arrangement, and would be pretty easy to execute.

Sidenote: It's taken a lot less time than I thought for this inscrutable urge to prune, deadhead and rearrange everything I see to arise within me. It happened when I worked at the bar and I couldn't help but clear bottles and glasses at bars I didn't work at, and now it's happening again when I walk past people's houses, or go to other garden centres and see violas or bergenias that are drooping and drying.

But then, when I was showing a customer who wanted to fill a 4'x22' space in front of her condo, we walked by several urn arrangements that beautifully mixed heather, pansies, lemon cypress, groundcovers, and a bunch of other things. That's about the point where I stop and think, Oh, boy. I really have a lot to learn but when I do, there's just so much I can do!

At least I have almost two weeks to ponder and browse until Mother's Day arrives.