Henry Homeyer: How to decorate outdoors in the winter

Editor’s note: The Chester Telegraph has been publishing Henry Homeyer’s Notes from the Garden since 2016. Now that he has gone into ‘semi-retirement’ and writing one column a month, we’ve asked him to curate his archives of articles to find the gems he believes are pertinent to our readers. We’re happy to present this first one, from 2006.

By Henry Homeyer
© 2023 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Winter is here, and there’s not much for gardeners to do outside. All we can do is sip tea, tend houseplants, and dream of spring. I try to avoid the blahs by making my outdoor environment as cheerful as possible.

I love the holiday lights, and keep mine lit longer than most people consider reasonable, I suspect. No inflated Santas or snowmen for me, just tiny lights in trees. I consider them winter lights, something to brighten those 16-hour nights. And not all are strung where the world can see them. I decorate our Dr. Merrill magnolia out behind the house with tiny blue lights just for us.

I love greenery, both indoors and out. I used to bring boughs of Canadian hemlock indoors because we have plenty to spare. But I’ve learned that hemlock branches are terrible as cut greens – they lose their needles faster than almost anything, even if used outdoors in a wreathe. Balsam fir and blue spruce are used as Christmas trees for good reason – they hold their needles better than most. White pines, while generally not used as indoor trees, hold their needles quite well, and are plentiful.

Some years I make wreathes, but this year I was too busy. Instead I cut pine boughs and the berry-covered branches of our native holly, winterberry (Ilex verticillata). I made a simple door decoration – a spray – by arranging short branches of pine as background, and adding stems of winterberry. I bound the stems with copper wire, and trimmed the cut ends square. The red berries stand out brightly in contrast to the greens. I also put berries and greens into the soil of a whisky barrel planter near the front door, where they are beautiful emerging from the snow.

Winterberry grows best along streams and in wet places. It’s a dioecious plant, meaning that some plants are male, others female – and you need both to get berries (duh), even though the males don’t produce fruit. I bought “improved” varieties, but I notice that wild winterberries in roadside swamps are often better producers of berries than mine.

Crabapples are self-decorating trees, which is part of the reason they are so popular. Their leaves fall off, but the fruits stay on like tiny reddish decorations. Some varieties are loved as food for birds, notably Snowdrift, Indian Summer and Indian Magic. They are eaten early in the season. Others such as Donald Wyman and Prairie Fire are largely avoided, so the fruit stays on until late winter or early spring when food is scarce.

If you don’t have a crabapple, you can decorate any tree with those apples that went squingey in the back of the refrigerator. You know, the ones that are soft and wrinkled. Tie them onto a tree as bird food, and in the meantime, they are decorations. Better than just throwing them out. If they lack stems, just cut up metal coat hangers into 6in pieces. Poke the wire though, and bend a hook on either end with a pair of needle nosed pliers. They’re good for a laugh when hung in a pine tree.

A few years ago, I bought a crabapple that was trained to grow in an ascending spiral, and planted it outside the kitchen window. It is more interesting now than midsummer when its leaves obscure the form. Other trees of unusual shape or bark texture are becoming increasingly popular with gardeners for their winter interest including twisted willows and contorted hazelnuts. This is a good time to read up on trees and decide on one to plant after the winter is over.

My friend Anna, who runs a game preserve in the Ural Mountains of Russia, taught us another way to decorate trees for the winter, and we do it some years. She taught us to take muffin tins or jello molds, fill them water, add a few drops of food coloring and put them outside to freeze. We put a piece of string into each to serve as a hanger once frozen. This works wonderfully, catching sunlight and making an otherwise ordinary shrub into a colorful, cheerful bush – at least until you get a rain or a thaw. We usually do it for the solstice, but the January thaw often does them in, leaving red and blue splotches on the snow beneath the tree.

Although I finally took pity on Mary Lou, our scarecrow, and lugged her into the barn, I have left other durable garden ornaments outdoors. We have a lovely blue ceramic birdbath in the garden, which stands out nicely against the snow. I left the pole bean structure up for the same reason – it breaks up the monotony of winter. It’s still a long time until spring, and I like to see some reminders of a warmer times.