Holiday decorating using your winter landscape is a natural, sustainable, and cost-saving way to decorate your Vienna, VA home for the holidays. You already have all of the ingredients! Just follow our DIY holiday decorating tips below to bring the outdoors indoors and create a cozy, festive home this holiday season.
Take Inventory: What Do You Have?
First things first: take a look around your landscape and see what you have that could work indoors. Consider what stands the best chance of surviving indoors. Keep in mind that the heat and lack of humidity of central heating can dry natural decorations out prematurely.
Greenery and Branches
If you have holly, ivy, pine trees or spruce, or magnolia trees around your Vienna home, these make great candidates for holiday decorating using your winter landscape. However, make sure to choose greenery that looks healthy to begin with. Pruning correctly is critical; make sure you cut where they start growing. Keep in mind, it’s not only greenery that can work. Bare branches can look lovely clustered in vases as well, so don’t limit yourself. You might find the perfect vase fillers laying on the ground!
Berries
If you love the look of berries, keep a close eye on whether they shed. Quite a few berries can be poisonous to children and pets. It’s often safer to opt for artificial berries that can be attached with green floral wire to your cut stems or branches.
Keep It Fresh
If you plan on decorating with green cuttings from your Vienna winter landscape, make sure you keep them fresh as long as possible by keeping the ends dipped in tepid water. Inserting them in moist floral foam when displaying them on your mantle and keeping them out of the way of your heating vents will also prolong their life for the holiday season. If you decide to use magnolia cuttings, spraying with metallic spray paint can camouflage the creeping browns when your cuttings are reaching the end of their shelf-life. Spray paint also adds an extra shine to the holiday decorating festivities.
Keep It Safe
Once you have cut and tied your arrangement materials into a wreath, swag, or other display, may sure to place them out of a direct draft from your heating system, to keep the leaves from drying as quickly. Remember to stay safe and never put fresh cut plants anywhere near a fireplace or lit candles, which could fall over and cause your arrangement to catch fire.
Extend Your Decoration’s Lifespan
Consider keeping some of your fresh-cut decorations outside in a cool, protected area out of direct sunlight, and bring them indoors only when needed for special occasions. This works with decorated potted plants such as clipped rosemary topiaries and live Christmas trees as well. Otherwise, regularly check your arrangements for excessive drying out of leaves or berry-dropping; remove or replace what you need to.
Take a Look at Your Landscape
So, take a walk outside, look beyond your front door and get busy decorating with some of the very best nature has to offer. Your landscape can continue to delight you in the winter months in new and unexpected ways, so take advantage and enjoy what you’ve nurtured all year long.
For more holiday-inspired landscaping, read our holiday lighting tips for some outdoor decorating advice. Sunrise also provides Northern Virginia commercial snow removal services for when the winter really hits.
Contact Sunrise Landscape and Design for all of your Vienna and Northern Virginia landscaping and design needs, this season and year-round!