Grow your own greens for holiday decorations

Flower & Garden Magazine, Oct-Nov, 1985 by Amalie Adler Ascher

If ever there was a case for growing your own evergreens, it's at holiday time when fresh decorations are an inherent part of the setting. If the plants that compose the designs are outside your door, each branch poised in air waiting inspection and approval, you can pick and choose to your heart's content. While non-gardeners celebrating the season may be obliged to shop early for the best selection, rooting through piles of boughs as they hunt for a curving branch or one with good foliage, you can delay cutting until you're actually ready to decorate.

Trees and shrubs growing in your yard produce not only the freshest of raw materials, they may spark ideas as well. When your place contains an assortment of evergreens, your eye can rove among the shades, textures and growth patterns, singling out those that look pretty together. Most important of all, you may catch sight of unusual structural lines that lend distinction. As you gather materials mentally, they begin to arrange themselves in your mind though you haven't as yet cut a single stem.

Best of all, supplying your own greens provides assurance that your doorway will be different. Some kinds of cut evergreens are rarely if ever found on the retail market. Although you probably won't have difficulty locating pine and juniper, kinds such as fir, cedar, magnolia and holly may be limited and finding a commercial source for aucuba, yucca, cryptomeria and perhaps even boxwood and ivy would be difficult. What's more, when you grow your own plant material, you know for a certainty it's garden-fresh when you start to use it.

Magnolia grandiflora you cut from your own bull bay tree is much easier to fashion into a doorpiece than the storebought kind. Since the outer growth of the home-grown variety is often strongly linear, a couple of branches, if carefully chosen, can practically arrange themselves.

Look for stems that lean gracefully and that will complement each other when turned to point in opposite directions as though flowing in one continuous line. Cut the stems in unequal lengths, using the longer piece for the top portion of the design. It should have less foliage and more bark exposed than the tail-end, whose rosettes, if spaced more closely, serve to create the impression of stability and bottom weight. Further pruning may be necessary if growth is still bushy or branchlets, forking the wrong way, send the line off course.

Join the stem ends of the two branches by tying them together with wire or binding them tightly with strong cord. If the union needs covering -- which it probably will -- hide it with a well proportioned magnolia rosette on a short stem, attaching it by the same process as before. Finish with a bow.

To enlarge on the design, you can add some sprigs of berried holly, or for a more unusual effect, mount the whole arrangement on a shapely piece of driftwood. Naturally all sorts of other embellishments are possible too. So give your imagination free reign.

Colorado blue spruce is easily composed into a swag, since its fan-shaped limbs conform to this type of decoration automatically. Two such fans, one in an upright position, the other facing down and laid to overlap slightly at the stem ends, then bound together, need little more than a bow or ornament to complete the design.

The outer growth of blue spruce, when exposed to the sun, turns a lovely shade of bright powder blue. Unfortunately, though, there are not many evergreens that match it. Most, such as laurel, holly and andromeda, in the broad leaved group and the majority of needled evergreens are decidedly emerald or yellowgreen and don't blend at all. Moreover, the fuzzy nature of blue spruce is better served if incorporated with smooth-textured foliage for contrast.

The perfect partner for blue spruce, for my money, is yucca. It too has a smoky cast. I grow two plants in my garden that belonged to my mother. Popularly called Adam's-needle for its tall stalks of bell-like white waxy flowers that bloom in early summer, yucca is hardy where I live, drought-resistant and insect-free. Mine are planted on a slope to stem erosion, but they could also be used as an accent or barrier just as well.

In cut decorations, the stiff, lance-shaped leaves resemble ribbons. For variation, you can knot the tops loosely or staple them into curls.

If your taste runs to a combination of blue and purple -- one of my favorite schemes -- you should like sprays of callicarpa or beautyberry mixed in with the yucca and spruce. Its reddish-purple hue borders on irridescence. Fruits remain on the stem long after the leaves have fallen, so the shrub is valuable in the landscape, too. Berried branches last well out of water and dry a natural, if somewhat duller color. If you want this material for cutting, you'll simply have to grow it.

Should you be game to elaborate on this swag still further, you could add a focal area of Mahonia pinnata. You won't find this in many gardens, much less as a cut evergreen. I grow five plants in my Baltimore garden, and they do suffer windburn here. But come April, yellow flowers burst forth along the stems.