Botanical World Offers More Than Usual Yule Greenery : Decor: Choices--from pineapples to laurel twigs--can be selected from the produce market or your own back yard.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly, but don’t stop there. The botanical world has more to offer than just traditional greenery when it comes to decorating for Christmas, and the alternatives--as likely to be from the farmer’s market or your own back yard as from the florist--often do the job more easily and cheaply.
The key, the professionals agree: Keep it simple.
“Use just a few things, and be unfussy about it,” says Barbara Milo Ohrbach, whose latest book, “Simply Flowers” (Clarkson N. Potter, $22.50), demystifies the process of flower arranging. “Go for the simple, but original, idea.”
A single-color theme is easier to pull off and has greater impact than a little of this and a little of that. “Get a color story going,” says Ohrbach, “whether you’re arranging flowers or decorating a table or doing a whole room.”
For Christmas, she suggests an all-red table using red dishes and red glasses, with pomegranates, apples and strawberries added (choose a personal color theme according to your linens and china). Arrange the fruit in colored bowls down the center of the table or tuck them in among a base of twigs or greenery, perhaps with bits of tartan ribbon and even some simple red tree ornaments for extra color. Candles are a must.
At her own home, Ohrbach plans “to do things with fruits” as her motif this year. A pineapple, the traditional symbol of welcome, will certainly figure as the focal point in an arrangement of fruit and foliage on the mantel or perhaps on the sideboard, designed carefully so the serving platters she will use fit right in place. Ohrbach likes the look of avocados, artichokes, pomegranates and colorful citrus fruit such as limes and kumquats--whatever looks best and is freshest at the market.
Using what the plant world has to offer is a well-known tactic for sprucing up for the harvest celebration of Thanksgiving but, in fact, it has been the tradition at Christmas at least since medieval times. At The Cloisters museum in New York City, a 13th-Century fresco in the collection depicts a garland of bay (laurel) leaves hanging above an altar at Christmastime, proof that the practice of decorating with greenery we continue today in modernized fashion is at least that old.
Today, Cloisters’ horticulturist Susan Moody and her staff continue to adorn the halls in a historically correct style each December, going to great lengths to get 50 pounds of freshly cut bay twigs all the way from Turkey, for instance, to re-create the fresco’s image. The homeowner, says Moody, can afford to interpret a little more.
“Use tips of boxwood as a substitute, in the spirit of the laurel twigs,” she says.
Moody’s daunting task yields other hints for the average home: Buy twice as many fresh materials as you need for indoor use, she suggests, so there are plenty for refreshing any that get spent-looking. Keep the backup supply in a cool place, but above freezing.
The lower layer of greens on mantels and elsewhere usually can be left in place for several weeks, but what’s on top--fruit such as beautiful little lady apples or the really special accent greens like variegated holly with berries--needs to be changed weekly, since it’s the visual focus.
Another trick: Use those little plastic and rubber water holders that florists put individual roses in to increase the life of things. Ivy leaves cut from beds outdoors will last up to two weeks in such a holder, which is easily disguised among the other greens, while the ivy would otherwise dry up quickly.
Perhaps the most familiar image of the season, after the Christmas tree, is a wreath, symbolic for early Christians of the triumph of Christ. Elaborate ones can be quite expensive, however.
If creating a wreath from scratch seems intimidating, you can embellish an inexpensive store-bought one with dried flowers, nuts or fruit for a fraction of the cost of a decorated wreath. Or try making a much easier door treatment, called a swag--a spray of greens and other materials. The basic ingredients: greens pruned sensitively from your own shrubs or purchased; microwaved slices of citrus fruit; dried pomegranates and even a few seedpods from a locust tree.
Oh, and a ribbon--not botanical, exactly, but please don’t use decidedly inorganic plastic, floral designers agree. Good, wide silk ribbon--the kind with thin wire along each edge for making well-shaped bows that hold their form--is expensive, admittedly, and a large bow can run to $20. But it is reusable year after year, and it’s the one thing in the holiday spirit you just can’t make from scratch.
