Living in Colorado I have the luxury of having one of the largest and highest mountain ranges at my back door. In just 45 minutes I can be at the base of Mount Evans, one Colorado’s many fourteeners. In the past couple years I have grown to love the challenge and accomplishment of hiking fourteeners. It is an amazing feeling when you summit and look in any direction and can see for, what seems, forever. Truly a Rocky Mountain High.
One of the unexpected delights of hiking is how inspired I became, as a florist, to the lines, textures and colors I came across in the landscape.
At the base of the trail I enter this wooded paradise, with amazing ground cover, breath taking trees and perfectly filtered sunlight. It is like walking in to a scene from a fairy tale. The sounds, smells and sights takes me to a different place, a place of humility and possibility. As I ascend the trail, I come across some many shade and tones of greens and browns and then there will just be this explosion of color from a single bloom tuck in the rotting limbs of a fallen pine tree.
I see blue and purples, whites and yellows, reds and oranges. All these plants, trees and mosses are tangled together in an effort to survive competing for sunlight and moisture creating a natural composition that as an artist I can only hope to imitate. Then I break through the tree line and now hiking up a rocky grassland.
Here the flowers and plants low and compact to the earth. Often hiding behind on the crack of a rock to protect itself from the extreme elements that exists at the top of the sky. Then after about 2-3 hours of climbing you summit to touch the sky!
Here are a few of my arrangements that have been inspired by my hiking adventures
~Chuck
Wow, I love the last bouquet photo – how nice would that be at a fall wedding. Very beautiful and nice hiking photos as well!