By The Bold Italic
Our friends, local landscape designer Christopher Reynolds (who was featured in our bird owner story) and photographer and regular TBI contributor Molly DeCoudreaux, wanted to share this easy, but beautiful seasonal “how to” with you Bold Italic readers. If your home could use a little more holiday cheer, but you don’t want to spend a fortune on a store bought wreath, create your very own using common California native plants you can find in your backyard.
Supplies:
- Wreath form
- Garden shears
— Floral wire or fine wire
(around 18 gauge)
— Native plants
You can use traditional conifers such as redwood, cedar, Monterey cypress, juniper, or fir. Or you can use other evergreen foliage as we did such as eucalyptus, acacia, lucadendron, or succulents. We used a combination of Luecadendron (the base), ‘Skyrocket’ Juniper (the blue conifer), “Goldcrest’ montrey cypress (yellow conifer), and Acacia iteaphylla (grey long leaves).
Process the plants into usable sizes. Depending on how you want the wreath to look, we recommend boughs of 6–10 inches.
Bundle the cut pieces into mini arrangements using floral wire. We used a ratio of 3 luecadendron: 2 long juniper: 2 acacia: 1 short Monterey cypress
Wire the bundles onto the wreath form. The bundles should be roughly 45 degrees from a radius. Continue to wire the plants on, overlapping slightly with each new bundle about four inches further around than the last. Use small pieces of foliage to cover the wreath form if any sections show. Make sure to wire with enough tension so the arrangements don’t slip around.
Accent the wreath. We used rose hips and corokia cotoneaster. You can also use holly, pittosporum, or cotoneaster berries, pine cones, and leafless branches.
Be proud of your creation.
You can be creative and incorporate unexpected things such as objects, or create a wreath for other occasions (think wheat in the fall). This technique can be used for garland too. Instead of wiring the arrangements to a form, create a chain by wiring one to the next overlapping every 4–6 inches.
Share photos of the wreaths you’ve created on our Facebook page, or by tagging us on Instagram and Twitter with #tbiwreath.
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All photos by Molly DeCoudreaux; instructions by Christopher Reynolds
