When Bill and I built our house 57 years ago, I dug up the stubborn Indiana clay and created what we have always called “the English garden”. On the white fence around the garden, we installed a white wood fence with two arched trellises, and along one section of the fence we planted three starts of bittersweet, knowing that we had to have both male and female plants. Evidently all the plants were of one gender because all these years we have never had one berry on the abundant veining plants.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
Around one of the trellises I had planted a start of wisteria. This fall to my amazement I found the trellis and another section of fence totally covered with a vine that turned out to be not wisteria but bittersweet—loaded with berries. I was thrilled! That was the beginning of a “pure and simple” Christmas! This year I have decided to use only natural things to decorate for Christmas: lots of bittersweet, fresh holly, some birch logs saved from a clump of birch that had died in our yard, pine branches, and whatever else I could find that was natural.
I will create garlands by stringing cinnamon sticks with cranberries on yarn. The old yard swing could be wound with pine and cedar branches. Wide strips of burlap ribbon can be made from the bags we had collected from the corn we feed to the swans.
While still on the plant, I sprayed-painted the dried blooms of the hydrangeas gold, silver, and copper to fill baskets and other containers, and I have collected the seed pods of the clematis vines that look like fuzzy whirligigs to put in tiny pottery vases with small sprigs of yet more bittersweet.
I will only have to add lights, candles, and a few bows of velvet ribbon, and the house will be filled inside and out with cheer--all natural and simple reminders of the creator himself who came to walk among us!
