Gardening with Mary: branch out with festive foliage

With Christmas almost upon us, I’ll be setting some time aside this week to slow down and enjoy a bit of creative indulgence away from the madness. I love putting on the boots and heading out into the garden, with a pair of secateurs, to breathe in the crisp, cold air, savour the quiet, and gather most of the materials I need for festive decorating.

Along with the obligatory holly and ivy, there are so many attractive evergreen options for decorative foliage to use in wreaths and garlands, table decorations, seasonal arrangements, and for adorning Christmas gifts. As well as providing materials for indoor displays, these plants can also add beauty and interest to your garden throughout the year.

Decorative greenery

Some of my favourites include prunus laurocerasus ‘Otto Luyken’, a compact form of laurel with elegantly slender, pointed leaves of glossy, deep green.

Another useful candidate is viburnum davidii for its large, leathery, prominently-veined leaves. Shade-loving skimmias are an essential evergreen for the winter cutting garden. In addition to their handsome leaves, female varieties also carry showy red or white berries.

I particularly favour skimmia japonica ‘Rubella’, a compact, male skimmia, with reddish, deep green leaves and highly decorative, dark red flower buds that form in autumn and persist throughout winter until the flowers open in spring.

For adding some sunny sparks into wreaths and table arrangements, the densely packed leaves of euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’ are a rich, shining green, irregularly edged with brightest yellow, or opt for the gold-flecked, holly-like leaves of osmanthus heterophyllus ‘Goshiki’.

If you prefer a more user-friendly and less prickly form of holly, I like to use ilex x meserveae ‘Blue Prince’ with shiny, deep blue-green foliage on dark purple stems. I also use ilex x altaclerensis ‘Golden King’, an oddly-named female holly that produces a generous crop of red berries among broad, only slightly spiny leaves margined with bright yellow.

Growing some conifers, such as pines, fir, yew, thuja and spruces will add to your range of evergreen foliage for indoor decoration.

Remember, you can also use coloured twigs, bunches of berries, faded flower heads and dried seedheads, cones from pine and larch trees and other natural materials in a range of different ways to create imaginative and eco-friendly Christmas decorations for your home.

Creative combinations

Our front door welcome wreath is usually a home-grown miscellany of skimmia, euonymus, ivy, golden yew and holly studded with larch cones, various seedheads, rosehips and other winter berries. The best seedheads are from plants like hydrangea, teasel, eryngium, ornamental alliums, astilbe, honesty, poppies, iris and phlomis.

Sometimes I spray-paint seedheads and cones metallic silver or gold, but generally, nature needs little help from me. These are all wired into a base ring woven from the branches of our leylandii hedge that surrounds the garden. Add a red ribbon, and maybe a few baubles for a bit of bling, and that’s the front door dressed.

For an easy hall table display, the leafless branches from birch trees or the twisted stems of contorted hazel, corylus avellana ‘Contorta’ or coloured-stem dogwoods exude stylish sophistication. These can be artfully arranged in a large vase and simply decorated with fairy lights. For added colour and interest, incorporate some interesting seedheads or fresh shop-bought roses. I especially like the red-twig dogwood, cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ – its long, flexible stems can be bent to form hoops and other imaginative shapes. In the garden, the crimson stems display best against a backdrop of evergreens. It responds well to its annual pre-Christmas pruning which encourages the best, brightly-coloured, new growth.

Judicious cuts

When cutting material for flower arranging from the garden, make sure you follow proper pruning procedures and guidelines for each plant. You don’t want to unwittingly clip off the blooms for next year.

Cut judiciously so that it’s not obvious where you have removed something. Often branches spoiling the shape of a shrub are just the ones to choose for indoor decoration.

Alternatively, snip material from the back of the plant. Always cut just above a bud or leaf joint, just as if you were pruning, so that you don’t leave stubs to die back. To extend the life of cut material, especially evergreen foliage, place stems in a bucket of water, ideally for 24 hours, before use.

If you don’t have any suitable plants for cutting in your garden, now is a good time to plant some, so you will have plenty to cut in a few years.

Plant shrubs: Plant fragrant, winter-flowering shrubs, such as sarcococca and Daphne odora in pots on the doorsteps.

Prune: Hard prune overgrown deciduous shrubs and hedges while they’re dormant. Any tender or evergreen plants are best left until growth resumes in spring.

Repair: Make use of this quiet time to repair and replace any garden structures, such as fences, arches, benches or wooden planters before the spring rush.

Fences: During a dry spell, apply wood preservative to wooden fences and plant supports. Deciduous climbers, denuded of their foliage, are more easily moved out of the way or covered to prevent splashing.

What climbing plant will grow against an east-facing wall that gets strong, cold winds for much of the winter? - Margaret, Co Sligo.

An east-facing wall will test any plant’s durability as it catches the first warmth of the winter sun, so most plants you put there risk being damaged by rapid thawing after frost. They will also bear the full brunt of cold, drying easterly winds. Among evergreen climbing plants, the choice is limited to ivies with tough, durable leaves.

One of the best deciduous climber options is the self-clinging, climbing hydrangea, hydrangea petiolaris. A charming self clinging climber that will thrive even on a north facing wall or try purple-bronze-leaved Virginia creeper, Parthenocissus henryana.

For a wide range of plants, check out gashgardens.ie