Gardener's Garden

Using Mother Nature’s Bounty

How to decorate with found objects.

In these last days of the year, as darkness falls earlier and earlier, we try to lighten our spirits by festooning our homes with sparkling lights and evergreen boughs. We gardeners scour our gardens for natural decorations, and trade with our gardening friends for those special beauties not found in our own yards. I am lucky to live on a wooded lot replete with rhododendron, mahonia, juniper, eastern white pines and a magnificent magnolia. I have a number of large rosemary bushes and two lavender bushes that can easily yield up some fragrant boughs. I trade cut branches of these evergreens with my even luckier gardening friends whose lots have evergreen hollies bursting with berries and deciduous hollies like winterberry holly whose fat …

•  5 Comments
• Photos (3)

Eleni Silverman

9:25 am on Tuesday, December 18, 2012

And so much more fun "shopping" for decorations in the fresh air!   more ›

Fall Hunting Season

While the fall hunting season may mean one thing to local game hunters, we hunters and gatherers of home decor are tracking targets of a different nature.

Living in Virginia we are blessed to be able to experience each season to its fullest.  We are now amidst the beautiful colors of autumn, enjoying the backdrop of yellow, orange, red and green.  These basic colors seem to take on a whole new spectrum during the fall.  Our natural environment assumes hues of amber, butterscotch, pumpkin, salmon, rust, scarlet, chartreuse, forest green, plum and eggplant, just to name a few.   As we head into the holiday season, many of us are thinking about decorating our homes for Thanksgiving.   With a variety of places to find decorative accents for your home, the first place we suggest before hunting through the stores is the outdoors.  The outdoors: Collecting decorative elements from the outdoors is …

• Photos (10)