Harvest your decorations

November 28th, 2010

   One of the fringe benefits of being a plant nerd is that you no doubt have a whole yard full of fresh holiday decorations — free for the pruning.

A homemade wreath of holly, falsecypress and dried hydrangea flowers.

   Take a walk around the yard and see how many plants you can “harvest” for both indoor and outdoor decorations.

   You won’t get goods any fresher. Plus the price is right, too.

   This is my wife’s department at our house. I’m much more familiar with growing the plants than figuring out how to do something HGTV-ish with them.

   Here are some plants we (and by “we” I mean “she”) often use from our decorating scavenger hunt:

   * Holly. Both evergreen hollies and the leaf-dropping winterberry types have red-berried sprigs that are perfect accents on any wreath. These also can be wired to Christmas trees. Other good berriers: nandina, bittersweet, cotoneaster, hawthorn and pyracantha.

   * Hydrangea. Cut, dried hydrangea flower heads make strikingly big “snowballs” on Christmas trees. Or wire them to large boughs and evergreen arrangements.

   * Douglas fir. Ideal source for evergreen cuttings. Use them for wreaths, boughs and swags. Other good evergreens for cuttings include concolor fir (most any fir, really), falsecypress, pine, arborvitae, boxwood and yew.

   * Pine cones. Don’t overlook interesting cones on any evergreen, but the pine family offers the biggest and best selection. Korean firs also produce large, blue-tinted cones. Spray paint them if you want mega-color. Or wire them to trees and boughs.

A basket of collected pine cones with a decorated bough of fresh evergreen cuttings.

   * Juniper. Some varieties of this evergreen offer clusters of waxy blue berries (actually mini-cones) in addition to the evergreen cuttings. If you like blue fruits, plant a couple of bayberries for future winter decorating.

   * Red-twig dogwood. This multi-stemmed, shrubby has bright red stems in winter. Cut some of them for use in holiday porch pots or wire them to wreath frames to make a red-wooded wreath.

   * Sweetgum. Yeah, those spiky seed balls might be annoying when you step on them, but they can be put to good use when spray-painted and used in much the same way as pine cones. Another other annoying fruit-dropper is osage orange, which look like warty, baseball-sized fruits but are interesting and unusual in arrangements.

   * Roses. Don’t overlook the berry-like fruit clusters on the tips of some roses. These “hips” make colorful, long-keeping accents on a par with holly berries. Most also have the good sense to be red – perfect for the season.