Pat Munts: A trip through the garden yields decor for the front door

I’ve been taking advantage of our warmer-than-usual weather to knock out a few more garden projects before the garden gets buried in snow and everything freezes to the ground. Last weekend that included doing a little pruning to clean up a brush pile in the back corner of our property. I needed to cut down two small Charlie Brown Douglas fir trees that were in the way. The trees were getting leggy and thin in the shadow of other trees.

Not being one to waste stuff, I wanted to give their removal an honorable ending. This being the Christmas season, their branches would make a pretty door swag for the front door.

I started with a metal coat hanger and bent it into a diamond shape. The hook at the top makes for a perfect hanger for the swag. I then cut about half a dozen branches off the fir trees and stacked them on top of one another to fill the thin spots and wired them to the base of the coat hanger hook with florist’s wire. Available at craft stores, this is a fine wire that bends easily and is colored green to match the greenery. Now the fun started.

With my base ready to go, I started prowling through the garden for other interesting foliage to add to it. The flat-leafed Oregon grape (Mahonia repens) and English holly along our front walk needed to be pruned back a bit. They are prickly if you run into them; not a very friendly way to welcome people to your house. Several of the Oregon grape leaves had turned red which would add the touch of color I needed.

Then it was off to find some different colored evergreens to punch up the color a bit more. I didn’t have to look far. Several small, low hanging branches of a spruce tree were blocking a sprinkler head and in need of removal. So off they came, and I was ready to finish the swag.

Working with the fir branch base, I wired two branches from the gray-green spruce to the swag. One was facing down while the other one faced up to hide the bare ends of the fir branches. I then wired on a fan of Oregon grape stems on top of the spruce. The smooth Oregon grape leaves were a nice contrast to the fine-textured fir and spruce needles. I made sure the red Oregon grape leaves were front and center. To finish off the design, I tucked in more slightly colored Oregon grape and shiny holly leaves around the center of the swag to finish it off. No ribbon needed.

Other plant materials that could be made into swags and centerpieces include juniper trimmings, short ponderosa pine branch tips, cotoneaster branches especially if they have red berries on them, rhododendron cuttings, ornamental grass seed heads or other seed pods, dried hydrangea flowers and red twig dogwood branches. Use your imagination, your garden is full of possibilities.