Decorate the yard for the holidays
Thursday, October 28, 2004 8:26 AM PDT
By Marianne Binetti
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E-mail this articleThe last week in October and Halloween has become second only to Christmas as a time to decorate for the holidays. Use these ideas for fall decorating and you'll not only have warm colors and autumn traditions for Halloween, but color for the Thanksgiving holidays as well.
Creating fall pocket gardens
Start with a recipe for arranging plant material. This helps avoid the hodgepodge look of too many plants of too many shapes and sizes. Here is a classic planting pattern used in the Italian gardens of Tuscany: One tall plant, small tree or non-living focal point; three medium shrubs, flowering plants or container gardens around the focal point; and five to seven low-growing groundcovers, bulbs or annuals or decorative mulch. To put this classic landscape pattern to use, look out your window for a tree or shrub with great fall color. Now imagine framing that focal point plant with low growing dwarf barberry.
Barberries are drought-resistant and come in gold, red or pink tones. Add some berried groundcovers of cotoneaster or kinninickick and you have a fall display in a pocket of your garden that scores big yardage in the game to rush into autumn color. To get more ideas for fall pocket garden plants check out the nurseries this week for shrubs of Oak Leaf hydrangeas, Beauty berry (Callicarpa), fall blooming heathers, perennials such as asters and sedums and a whole range of ornamental grasses.
Creating fall porch gardens
Welcome the holidays with porch displays that celebrate the harvest season. Gather a group of pumpkins and arrange them on top of a display of old suitcases. Take an old metal tricycle and spray it with rust-colored spray paint. Now you have an autumn focal point that can hold a basket of mums or asters on the seat or in the basket of the bike. Fall wreaths are easy to make for front door displays.
Get a woven grapevine or straw wreath from the craft store. Collect branches of leaf color and cut them into smaller sections. Poke these into your woven wreath frame, adding dried flowers from sedums and succulents and berries for color that will last until December.
Use corn stalks to decorate porch pillars or to add towers of texture to your garden bed. When the stalks turn brown and dry you can add them to your compost pile. Bales of hay set onto the porch for gourd and pumpkin displays can also go into the compost pile or be used to layer on top of tender plants.
Fall can be a sad time for gardeners as the plants begin to enter dormancy but it is also a time to celebrate the change of seasons with fiery color and rustic displays of harvest.
Send your gardening questions to Marianne Binetti at P.O. Box 872, Enumclaw WA 98022, enclosing a self-addressed, stamped envelope for a personal reply. Or see her Web site: www.binettigarden.com
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