Have a holly good Christmas
A quick scout around your garden can help give your decorations a lovely lift
YOUR garden can provide endless festive delights and decorations if you know where to look. When most of the cards and presents have been bought, festive food and drink ordered, and the Christmas tree is in place, all that’s left are the final touches.
And that’s the fresh flower arrangements and home-made foliage decorations.
So take half an hour out of your busy schedule to settle down for a creative session.
Don’t worry if you’re not an expert – just have a go and enjoy yourself.
It all starts with a pleasant wander round the garden collecting suitable material. Look out in particular for traditional evergreens and berries.
Plain green holly will do fine for tucking behind the pictures or making into a wreath, but variegated is even better – and it’s not so easy to buy in the shops.
Don’t worry if your holly doesn’t have any berries – you can always buy fake ones and wire them into place where you need them, or you could cheat and add a few sprigs of pyracantha or cotoneaster berries, or even rosehips if the birds have left any.
Ivy – both plain and variegated – is a seasonal essential. If you have mature wild ivy growing up trees, then strip some off, complete with berries.
You’ll also find a mixture of evergreen foliage very useful – go for laurel, fatsia and conifers, anything from blue spruce to straight-ish stems of yew and fan-like chamaecyparis sprays can be used, as can pieces snipped from a hedge.
If you have them, a few branches of winter-flowering shrubs such as witch hazel, winter jasmine or wintersweet are lovely to bring indoors. Their tight buds will quickly open in the warmth.
And if you have red-stemmed dogwoods or hazel, a few pieces of these can be handy, too.
Don’t butcher your shrubs – cut from the back of the plants and thin out the stems rather than leaving a big gap.
Tidy up your bunches of flower-arranging materials while you’re still outside in the garden so
you don’t make a lot of mess indoors.
Remove the lower leaves of evergreens (which only turn smelly and slimy in a vase when they’re underwater) and lightly prune stems to improve the shape.
When you’re back indoors, recut the base of each stem, making a long slanting cut – which increases the area available to take up water – before standing the lot in a bucket of deep, tepid water for a good long drink.
This makes them last longer indoors and gives you time to decide how best to use them.
Don’t worry if your holly doesn’t have any berries – you can always buy fake ones and wire them into place...