Winter garden sampler
During the growing season, I enjoy setting up miniature coloured bottles and then filling each one with flowers or leaves, something that picks up (or contrasts) with the colour of each bottle.
What could I find in the December garden for a similar study?
Armed with a large basket and garden shears, I headed out into the back garden in search of berries, fresh greens and dried seed heads.
As if collecting flowers for a summer bouquet, I looked for interesting shapes and forms in the winter garden. The basket was quickly filled with stems of dried echinacea, bee balm, brown-eyed Susan, astilbes, bearded tongue, heal-all, border sedum, rosemary and rose hips. I chose a half-dozen stems of each type of seed head, cut the stems to the same length and trimmed away any stray leaves before putting them in the basket.
It was a calm and surprisingly warm morning, so I set up the glass vases on the deck and started to arrange the stems. Tiny chocolate brown balls (brown-eyed Susans) in the short turquoise bottle, mid-brown, spiny heads of coneflower (echinacea) worked in a pink bottle, I even chose several heads of echinacea that had already been picked bare by the local finches and sparrows. Look closely at the bare form, it’s quite decorative: after the seeds have been picked away, you are left with a cone-shaped cushion with a rigid, zig-zag ruffle at the base. I could imagine this form painted and turned into hats for miniature garden dolls, but I digress …
The orange bottle was filled with a handful of bee balm seed heads. They were tricky to arrange, so light and airy, each sphere was made up of hundreds of tiny tubes. The bee balm heads were gently fragrant.
Tall, tree-like forms of rusty brown astilbe are surprisingly resilient and sturdy, I popped them into a tall yellow vase that picked up their warm colouring. The tall, squared off heads of heal all (Prunella vulgaris) look like tiny pine cones stacked up on a skewer. They are really weeds, but I let a few of them mingle with the sedum and purple coneflowers in the side border, they all seem to get along. The heal all stalks were plentiful and quite sturdy so I picked a handful and tucked them into a jam jar. Ditto for a bunch of rose hips that couldn’t be contained in a smaller bottle.
After photographing my collection, I tucked the seed heads in a wooden box filled with sprays of white cedar. It’s not a fancy arrangement, but it looks pretty on the kitchen table. The extra bottles filled with seed heads have found a home on the kitchen widow sill for the holidays.
Rosemary wreath
A huge rosemary plant spent the summer in a container on the deck. It was a luxury to have a generous supply of fragrant rosemary near the kitchen door, but the shrub would not survive the winter. I decided to try my hand at making a wreath. Long, arching stems (30 to 45 centimetres long) were clipped and the bottom of each stem was trimmed of needles. A small vine wreath was repurposed as a base, and the trimmed rosemary stems were tucked into the twigs in a circular pattern. Any long stems were allowed to radiate out from the form, giving the wreath a spiral pattern. Green florist’s wire was wrapped around the wreath to firm the stems in place. A handful of rose hips, tucked around the centre of the form, adds a festive touch.
Conditioning greens
I treated myself to an armful of incense cedar, white pine, spruce and fir stems to fill the planters on the front porch and to decorate the mantle in the family room — nothing says Christmas like fresh greenery. It’s a good idea to condition the stems before arranging them in your designs. Unwrap the greens when you get them home, to let the air circulate around them. If the needles feel dry, mist them with a little water. Give the stems a fresh cut and set them in a bucket of water; you can add a packet or two of floral preservative if you have some on hand. Set the bucket in a cool basement and let the stems re-hydrate for 12 to 24 hours.
This year I tried something different for the mantle. I had a pair of white birch branches left over from a previous arrangement. I set the stems on the bare mantle and then arranged shorter sprays of greenery around the stems, using them as an anchor. I wove a set of tiny battery-operated lights through the greenery and added golden pine cones and little wooden angels to dress up the design.
Fresh greens will last about two weeks indoors. You can spritz the greens with water to help keep them fresh, keep them away from sources of heat and direct sunlight if possible, always use ‘cool’ lights.
The snow might be swirling around outside, but treat yourself to a walk in the winter garden and collect a few stems of greenery and dried seed heads — bring a little bit of the garden indoors for the holidays.
— Theresa Forte is a local garden writer, photographer and speaker. You can reach her by calling 905-351-7540 or by email at theresa_forte@sympatico.ca.