Gather Your Garden’s Gifts
Your garden may have just what you need to make the holidays festive and fragrant indoors! Using your outdoor living space as a resource can save time, money and hassle during the busy month of December. Here are some ways to make the most of your great outdoors.
Take a stroll through your yard today and identify the fragrances you would like indoors for the holidays. To bring fresh, warm holiday scents indoors:
- Take cuttings from fragrant pines, cedars and junipers and place around the house as impromptu potpourri
- Cut plants now and dry them for a couple of weeks before mixing into sumptuously scented displays
- Create potpourri from sages and lavenders – each species of these wonderful herbs adds fresh and delicious scents
- Enhance the scent of dried cuttings throughout the holidays by adding essential oil
Decking the Halls… Sustainably
Bring the beauty and color of your outdoor living space inside to create healthy, safe and sustainable arrangements. For wildly sustainable holiday décor:
- Arrange red, pink, or white tea tree blooms or blooms from Heather and Autumn Sage to add color to a room
- Gather fallen pine cones to create arrangements, such as wreaths, using only a flexible wire – their simple, lovely structure will be the perfect background for decorative accents during any season
- Save a trip to the tree lot by using cuttings from your own junipers, birch or pine trees to make wreaths and arrangements
- Collect vibrant red, orange, yellow and purple leaves as they drop (… before we sweep them up!) to serve as a base or backdrop for arrangements
- Add berries from plants like Cotoneaster or Toyons to wreaths, vased arrangements, or even Christmas trees for a touch of merriment and color
- Change out traditional Christmas lights for LED holiday lights to save 90 percent on energy costs (contact FormLA for details)
Thinking long term can make a holiday gift a treasure for the year to come, or even a lifetime. Consider these long-term strategies for giving yourself a little something:
- Plant gourds and corn in your garden this spring and summer– what you don’t roast and enjoy will be great for holiday arrangements
- Add Redbuds, Spiraea, Buckeye, Ribes, or Elderberry, natives that will provide brilliantly colored leaves for your landscape and indoor holiday color
- Invest in a Christmas tree of plants that can be incorporated into your garden after the holidays, such as Rosemary, Christmas Berry, junipers or cedars, or even a traditional pine
- Repurpose your traditional Christmas tree… watch for tips in our January newsletter!