Last week, I had the pleasure of designing and creating these festive winter planters with two of our enhancement crew members, Amanda and Melissa. Most commonly you see these types of planters on the steps of residential homes, but I just love the impact these over-sized containers make at this busy commercial building. What a perfect way to decorate for the holiday season, and the best part is that they can be left up all winter long!
We started this project with some design inspiration from Pinterest. Since the extra-large containers were already supplied, we knew we needed to go BIG with our design. We liked the look of these planters:
We liked the general idea of these two containers; with birch branches in the middle,red dogwood, and lots of greenery. However, we thought the birch branches should be the tallest and that the red dogwood should be approximately 3/4 the height of the birch branches. We also wanted to make sure the scale of the design was appropriate for the container. Therefore we needed a specific length of birch branches and red dogwood. Since the containers we used were so large, we also needed to have enough greenery around the bottom to fill the diameter of the container and hide any soil underneath.
We found all the supplies at our local Sheridan Garden’s Nursery. Their inventory was amazing; it had everything you could ever want when designing a holiday planter. We decided to use the client’s company colours as the colour scheme for our planter. We bought large red and silver ornaments, as well as some rose gold painted pine cones to add colour and sparkle. Next, we had to decide what height the birch branches should be, luckily Sheridan had many to choose from. We ended up going with the second largest height since our planters are very large. We bought 3 birch branches for the middle of each planter and 2 bundles of red dogwood that would be approximately ¾ of the height of the birch branches. For the greenery, we choose bundles of pine, cedar and spruce branches.
Step 1: First we secured the birch branches in the center of the container. We were fortunate to have deep soil, were able to sink the branches far enough into the soil that they were not able to move. An alternative is to use floral foam to secure all of your branches, and greenery.
Step 2: We then added the red dogwood all around the base of the birch branches
Step 3: We added the pine branches to the center. They are more rigid than the other types of greenery and helped add volume and height to the middle of our planter
Step 4: We layered the spruce and cedar branches in a circular arrangement around the container.
Step 5: The final step is to add any festive decorations you’d like. We added red and silver ornaments, as well as some rose gold pine cones.
Voila, you’ve made beautiful and festive winter planters to last all season long!
Jenna Monk
