BOUGH BRIGADE Decorates Dundurn Castle
FOR 50 YEARS members of the Garden Club of Hamilton have bundled up boughs and branches, corralled their dried roses and peonies, and headed to Dundurn Castle to decorate the museum for Christmas.
There shall be no glitter, or twinkling lights or singing Santas. Victorian propriety must guide every garland and urn.
“We try to use as much material as we can from the time the castle was inhabited,” says Wendy Downing as she tucks yellow yarrow and marigolds in an arrangement.
Downing, who heads the decorating team from the garden club, says they strive for authenticity “but it’s important to put on a bit of a show, because you want people to come.”
Victorian Christmas at Dundurn starts Sunday with a free event that lets the public see the home of Sir Allan MacNab done up for the holidays.
From noon to 4 p.m. costumed interpreters roam the lavish home describing what the holiday season was like in the big Italianate villa overlooking the bay. After Sunday, tickets need to be purchased for day and evening Christmas tours.
It takes the garden club group about four days to decorate the castle for Christmas.
They make the beautiful garland that wraps around the sweeping staircase to the second floor, create urns for windowsills, install mantel decorations and arrange bowls of greenery for the dining room table.
“We try to use as much material as we can from the time the castle was inhabited.” WENDY DOWNING GARDEN CLUB OF HAMILTON
“AFTER A WHILE, if you were good, you graduated to decorating the drawing room.”
That’s how Elizabeth Coons, archivist for the Garden Club of Hamilton, describes “the old days.”
She has lugged three of her 24 scrapbooks of garden club history to Dundurn. Looking at old Hamilton Spectator photos of the club at work, you can see that the rules inside the museum were less stringent than today.
Club members stood on the dining room table to decorate the overhead light fixture, used real Christmas trees, and climbed ladders to add garland over doorways. All these practices eventually vanished in the wake of museum guidelines and safety regulations.
The prize space to decorate was the drawing room. In the beginning, only certain members were allowed to do it.
“They were fussy, they even closed the doors,” Coons remembers.
The Garden Club of Hamilton formed over tea at the Tamahaac Club in 1951. The 21 charter mem-
The prize space to decorate was the drawing room; in the beginning, only certain members were allowed to do it.
bers were a who’s who of Hamilton and dug into a bunch of civic beautification projects.
They trimmed the Christmas trees at the then-Henderson General Hospital, made arrangements for and delivered flowers to nursing homes, sponsored gardens at the Royal Botanical Gardens and, in 1967, arrived with tools and enthusiasm to help with the restoration of the Dundurn Castle grounds and gardens.
From then on they became the bough brigade for Dundurn’s Christmas decor.
Taking a holiday tour at Dundurn is a look into a quieter, understated celebration of Christmas.
From the natural decorations with their heady scent of pine and cedar boughs, the rich sound of old-fashioned carols and maybe the sweet smell of shortbread wafting from the toasty basement kitchen, it captures a simpler time.
“In the early days we did so much research on the type of plant material used here in 1855,” says Coons, a past-president of the club.
“It’s been such a learning experience decorating Dundurn. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”