Last but not least, as they say in all the magazines these days, I try to "bring the outdoors in", and take a little of the indoors out. I think cut flowers are beautiful, but their cost vs. pleasure ratio is just too low for my liking. I'm not that good at arranging them, they cost a fortune if you have someone else do it for you, and then they go pookie on you in the blink of an eye. I was never great with houseplants either, and I think that's because they tend to look much the same, day in and day out, so I tend to forget that they are even there. Instead, I prefer to concentrate on the three B's - berries, bulbs and branches. In the fall, nothing could be easier than just sticking three or four beautiful berry branches in an urn or rustic vase. The trick is to find one with a narrow opening, so it takes only a few branches to fill it, and they stay upright. I also love fall leaf garlands and the huge assortment of bead and berry garlands that are available these days. Weave one through the arms of your chandelier, drape them over the top of your hutch or armoire, or use them down the center of your table or as a topping for your drapes - just use them. To decorate your front entry for fall, try taking an autumn leaf garland and twisting it around a length of orange rope-light, then outline your door with it. For winter, how about using a sparkly glass beaded garland with some white twinkle lights to wrap a spiral-cut juniper by your front door?
In addition to being a garden designer, I am also the visual merchandiser at a great little garden center in Houston. One thing I use in a lot of my displays is mesh cloth or abaca - that wonderful, scrunchable, fabric/netting-like stuff that comes in every color in the rainbow. Every fall, when we get our huge shipment of pumpkins in at the nursery, we also get a bunch of cornstalk bundles. Since we have a nice wrap-around porch on the gift shop, I thought it would be fun to attach some of the bundles to its columns. I knew normal ribbon would never hold up to the elements, but I didn't want to resort to plastic either. So, one year I decided to experiment with beautiful lengths of rust and green mesh cloth, with sparkly metallic threads that catch the sun and make it glisten. I scrunched it up into giant pouffy bows, tied it off with twist-ties, and attached the cornstalk bundles to the porch posts with those. Not only were they gorgeous, they stayed that way for several weeks, through wind and rain. As it turns out, we had a lot more people asking to buy the bows than we did the cornstalks. If you don't have porch columns, try attaching a corn bundle to your gaslight in the yard, or even to a bare tree.
And speaking of bare trees, probably the very best decorating accessory you can have is some bare, dead tree branches. One fall, just after a big storm, I was having lunch at my favorite taco joint. When I glanced out the window, I realized that the field behind the restaurant was full of dead branches that had been blown down in the storm. I jumped up, ran outside, grabbed several large branches, dragged them across the parking lot, and hefted them up into my truck. Now, I'm sure that every person in that restaurant was convinced that I had flipped my lid, but nay, nay my friend. It was almost time for our annual fall festival at the nursery, and I knew that those branches would make fantastic Spooky Trees. We filled two big black cauldron-like pots with sand and stuck the branches down into those, strung orange twinkle lights on them, dripped Spanish moss from the branch tips, and then decorated them with assorted plastic bats and spiders. Finally we set one on each side of the entry to the greenhouse, and they were quite striking, if I do say so myself. I had a friend in Indonesia who almost got herself arrested for trying to bring home some dead branches she had found. For winter, she spray-painted hers white, used white twinkle lights on them, and had them positively dripping with candy canes and glass icicles. In spring she switched to pastel lights, and hung her collection of decorated eggs from the branches. Put your thinking-cap on and you could probably come up with lots of other ideas as well.
(to be continued)
In addition to being a garden designer, I am also the visual merchandiser at a great little garden center in Houston. One thing I use in a lot of my displays is mesh cloth or abaca - that wonderful, scrunchable, fabric/netting-like stuff that comes in every color in the rainbow. Every fall, when we get our huge shipment of pumpkins in at the nursery, we also get a bunch of cornstalk bundles. Since we have a nice wrap-around porch on the gift shop, I thought it would be fun to attach some of the bundles to its columns. I knew normal ribbon would never hold up to the elements, but I didn't want to resort to plastic either. So, one year I decided to experiment with beautiful lengths of rust and green mesh cloth, with sparkly metallic threads that catch the sun and make it glisten. I scrunched it up into giant pouffy bows, tied it off with twist-ties, and attached the cornstalk bundles to the porch posts with those. Not only were they gorgeous, they stayed that way for several weeks, through wind and rain. As it turns out, we had a lot more people asking to buy the bows than we did the cornstalks. If you don't have porch columns, try attaching a corn bundle to your gaslight in the yard, or even to a bare tree.
And speaking of bare trees, probably the very best decorating accessory you can have is some bare, dead tree branches. One fall, just after a big storm, I was having lunch at my favorite taco joint. When I glanced out the window, I realized that the field behind the restaurant was full of dead branches that had been blown down in the storm. I jumped up, ran outside, grabbed several large branches, dragged them across the parking lot, and hefted them up into my truck. Now, I'm sure that every person in that restaurant was convinced that I had flipped my lid, but nay, nay my friend. It was almost time for our annual fall festival at the nursery, and I knew that those branches would make fantastic Spooky Trees. We filled two big black cauldron-like pots with sand and stuck the branches down into those, strung orange twinkle lights on them, dripped Spanish moss from the branch tips, and then decorated them with assorted plastic bats and spiders. Finally we set one on each side of the entry to the greenhouse, and they were quite striking, if I do say so myself. I had a friend in Indonesia who almost got herself arrested for trying to bring home some dead branches she had found. For winter, she spray-painted hers white, used white twinkle lights on them, and had them positively dripping with candy canes and glass icicles. In spring she switched to pastel lights, and hung her collection of decorated eggs from the branches. Put your thinking-cap on and you could probably come up with lots of other ideas as well.
(to be continued)
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