Ribbons And Boughs Inland Northwest Wreath-Makers Offer Personal Touch To Holidays While Supplementing Their Income

Barb Arnold is moving up in the world.

Friends once called the one-time sheep and grain farmer-turned-greenhouse operator “the Herb Lady.”

Recently, they’ve dubbed her “the Wreath Queen,” a leader in the swelling ranks of holiday wreath-makers.

Arnold is among an estimated 100 Inland Northwest residents who supplement their holiday incomes making Christmas wreaths sold at school fund-raisers, church bazaars and craft shows.

“It’s perfect work,” she says. “The greenhouse is slow during this time of year and the materials are right outside your door.”

Long a symbol of warmth and friendship, wreaths and wreath-making have blossomed into a regional cottage industry, says Lynn Wiedemann, owner and president of Marble Mountain Supernaturals, a Post Falls floral wholesaler.

Wreath-makers develop catalogs and sell thousands of variations on the traditional pine-bough circle.

Some create white and gold sparkled wreaths, symbolizing purity and richness. Marble Mountain even makes a two-ton, 25-foot diameter wreath to hang above the parking garage at the Coeur d’Alene Resort.

“People have always done it as a hobby, but a bunch of local people now wholesale” Wiedemann says. “As society gets more mechanized and away from nature, people like being around natural products,”

In the gray months near year’s end Arnold holes up in her husband’s workshop with fragrant piles of lodgepole pine boughs, cedar branches and fir tree limbs. She crimps greenery onto hundreds of circular wire frames, tosses in berry sprigs or pine cones and finishes with a red bow.

Arnold collects the goodies herself from nearby private forest land - not always a simple task. She’s fought waist-deep slush. And worse.

“Once, without realizing it, I went out on the first day of deer season,” she says. “I kept hearing gun shots and I was wearing a green sweater and green turtleneck and thought ‘Oh no, I look like a tree!”

But it lets her to do what she loves - work with plants - out of season.

Few get rich with the seasonal business. Arnold’s sale prices hover around $25 each for 400 or so wreaths. She brings in a few thousand dollars a winter.

DeSmet’s Joan Kerttu, a forester and wreath-maker, says it’s merely “a nice financial shot in the arm before Christmas.”

Kerttu started making wreaths for friends in 1988. It was so easy, she expanded.

“I thought I’d go out on logging jobs and pick up after them,” she says, but soon found that didn’t work. “They skid the trees in and get all muddy.”

Still, Kerttu kept at it and now sells 1,200 wreaths a year.

A handful go to the activist group North Idaho Women in Timber. Most are sold by mail, in every state, she says, except Maine.

“That was not heard of 10 years ago,” she says.

It takes Kerttu and some friends a half-hour to finish a wreath “from the woods and into the box for UPS.”

Recently she considered expanding again - a West Coast wreath-maker she knows sells 30,000 a year and uses truck loads of greenery - but decided against it.

“Right now, I can guarantee each customer I’ve handled each wreath at least once,” she says. “I like that.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo