Queen Anne's Lace, and the Queen of Anns

I love the way this arrangement turned out, so I had to share it with you.

Did you know you could use Queen Anne's Lace, that ubiquitous weed, in flower arrangements?  I sure didn't!
It's so pretty and lace-y, that as a child, I couldn't resist picking it and bringing it to my mother, who put it in a vase. where it died. in an hour.

It turns out, the trick to picking Queen Anne's lace is to pick it early in the morning and immediately put it in hot water.  I was too chicken to put in really hot water, so I used the hottest water that would come out of my tap.  I left it in the hot water until it cooled, in about 2 hours.  Then I used it like normal in an arrangement.  You know what? It lasted better than my zinnias, which are known for being great cut flowers!

This is particularly exciting because my best friend's name is Ann, and she's getting married!  She loves Queen Anne's lace the way I'm sure I'd love a flower if it was called "Empress Joanna Flower."  So, we'll be able to harvest it from neighboring fields and bedeck her wedding with it.  I'm super excited.
She's also keen on ferns, so we just planted 33 fern plants to harvest for the flower arrangements.  We bought them as bare-root plants, so they looked remarkably unpromising when we unpacked them.  Bare root plants are literally dirty pieces of root in baggies.  I open up a box from the growers and, every time, there's a moment when I think "I paid money for this?"  However, we have high hopes.  Gardening, for me, is frequently an exercise in hope for the future.

As a bonus, that yellow flower in the arrangement isn't a form of goldenrod as I had previously thought.  It's actually a vintage garden flower that has escaped from someone's garden and was growing wild next to a post in my neighborhood.
The name? "Sweet Annie"