Winter | Deborah Silver & Co.

The Holiday At Home

The holiday season is a very busy time for us. This work is different than landscape and garden design, but not unrelated. The winter work does not revolve around the plants. It revolves around people. For that reason alone, I greatly enjoy it. I am party to a lot of holiday celebrations. Families. Children. Community. Helping hands. Every client who asks that their pots and landscape be dressed for the holiday and winter has a reason to request the work. Whether or not I ever learn the circumstances, I make every effort to treat every project as if it were my own. That means I may not get to my own until late December.

This year was no exception. Dan and crew installed a giant Christmas tree in my side garden pot the second week of December. I put faux fruit and bleached pine cones on my garland on a Sunday morning a few days later. I have always found the Williamsburg style of holiday decorating appealing. I also think is looks good, and is appropriate to my circa 1930 house. Owen and LaBelle did the the grapevine and lights, and installed it a few days after that. This held me over until the 23rd, when my pots both front and back which transformed my house into a home. David and I put together this year’s version of a Christmas tree at the shop. It was easy to transport all of a piece. Buck and I celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, and we were ready. I am happy for a late installation date, as I will leave this up all winter. I may run the lights all winter too.

A few days ago I had the chance to come home early, and take a leisurely tour. I like how the garland looks with my 19th century concrete urns and pedestals on my front porch. I like just as well how the warm colors of the fruits look with my yellow/peachy brown brick. The boxwood looks how it always looks-fresh and green.

traditional winter garland and associated pots

The front door

winter arrangement in a vintage Galway pot

winter centerpiece with curly willow

on the driveway, red bud pussy willow, 2 shades of purple eucalyptus, and Norway spruce

a pair of pots

Our Christmas tree. This year I took a steel topiary form, and covered it with grapevine and lights. I set the form in an incredibly beautiful galvanized tub that Rob purchased in England this past September. A foam form is wedged in the top of the pot. The foam was stuffed with German boxwood. The spikes on the bottom of the topiary form were pushed all the way into the foam.

I decked out that lighted grapevine topiary tree with feathered birds and clusters of small chartreuse holiday glass balls.

We had a very merry Christmas.

last night

the front door New Year’s Eve

A little holiday fireworks in the garden. Happy New Year!

Save

Posted on: January 1, 2017 33 Comments

Filed Under: Holiday, Winter

Winter Ready

We finished our last winter installation this Tuesday past. A client who is out of town on holiday did not mind if her winter pots did not get done until after December 25th. Her home is now winter ready for her return. Yesterday we finished the winter pots at the store. So we are ready for winter too. The garland got done early in the season. We only have 6 or 7 to do in any given year. Buck’s fabricators at Branch make them, and install them. They do help a great deal with the winter containers, once those holiday garlands are done and hung. Once the first 6 garlands for clients were done and up, they made our shop garland. We had that garland, and not much else until 2 weeks ago, when Rob had a moment to dress this cast iron cauldron for winter. The spruce tips were a new green for us-of course he wanted to try them out. The hand wrought iron topiary form from England is wrapped with Lumineo LED string lights. Not so easy to see in this picture are a number of small scale pine cone picks that for all the world look like they are attached to those spruce tips. For weeks, a garland and a single pot were all we had to show for the winter.

So why wouldn’t I dress the store for winter early in the season? Lots of our shop clients would like to see what we have a mind for the season. Some of them might be inclined to take some aspect of our idea into consideration for their own winter holiday. There are plenty of good answers to that question. The strongest answer is that our clients come first. We did just shy of 60 projects between November 10 and December 24. Just about 200 containers. And two holiday parties. This is a lot of of work to do in a very short amount of time. Not every client can be first, but it is easy to do the shop last.

There is another reason why we dress the shop for the winter last. I consider it a personal challenge to design and install from the left over materials. If you were raised as I was, the meals featuring leftovers were not my favorite. Some were downright unappealing. But as a designer, I have always been intrigued by the possibility that good design can take a rag tag group of the last of the materials, and make something worth looking at from them. I cannot really explain this, but metaphorically speaking, making a beautiful meal from a group of leftovers is a challenge that is satisfying.

The greens in the window boxes at the shop were the leftover scraps from a busy season. Even those scraps proved to be not enough. The day after Christmas we bought 6 Frazier fir Christmas trees at a tree lot for one dollar each. It took four trees to produce enough greens for the window boxes at the shop. These were trees that were moments from being discarded- I was happy to rescue them from the discard heap. The labor to cut up the branches was considerable. But the end result was worth it. The window boxes do not look like they were stuffed with a material that no one wanted. The spruce tips in the centerpiece came to us late in the season, so we had those left over as well. I was more inclined to try to put them to use, than pitch them.

It is impossible to tell in advance which twigs will be left over. Every year the twig overage is different. This year, we had curly willow left, and just about nothing of any other type of twig. So curly willow was destined to play a part in the shop winter pots. The sage eucalyptus was not so popular this year, but the color is striking with the curly willow, and the red berries.

I will admit we never have any bleached pine cones left over, no matter how many we buy. So I did purchase 2 cases of them, just for my clients and the shop winter display. We put them in the garland, and in all of the pots and window boxes. At the close of the season, we had 2 bags left. Detroit Garden Works has their only sale of the year between December 25 and January 7. One of those bags of cones was sold yesterday, and I am sure the last one will find a home soon.

We also manufacture the most stunning lighted rings for winter gardens; I have posted pictures of them plenty of times. Both the hanging and spiked versions are just about gone now. But we did have 4 steel rings that had not had lights put on them, so we used those rings as a base for a collection of curly willow wreaths that sit at the back of each window box. Those three foot diameter wreaths are properly scaled to our industrial sized windows, and that vibrant color reads even at a distance.

Lighting is such an essential part of any Michigan winter display. They gray days will vastly outnumber the sunny ones from now until April. We did use left over incandescent garland light strings in the window boxes and pots, as we are transitioning over to stocking only LED lights. The light strings on the garland are attached to the grapevine portion of that garland. Those light strings are LED lights. One string is 110 feet long, which eliminates the need to string light sets together. As the LED lights have a 10 year lifespan, we can store the grapevine with the lights still attached for next year’s garland, and maybe the year after that. The grapevine is a durable material.

I will enjoy being able to walk past all my leftovers every day all winter long.

That pot at the end of the driveway has some company now.

Save

Posted on: December 29, 2016 18 Comments

Filed Under: Detroit Garden Works, Winter Tagged With: the winter garden, lighted containers for winter

The Work Of The Week Of December 12

holiday garland

snowy entry

winter arrangement in a lead egg cup

contemporary arrangement

2 pots for winter

winter arrangement with eucalyptus, tiger branches, and green spruce

contemporary winter pot

arrangement with curly copper willow, camellia branches, and mixed greens

4 pots for winter

pots at the sidewalkgreen and white garland

contemporary arrangement of twigs and lights, faced down with boxwood

cast iron cauldron with a lighted steel topiary form and spruce tips

glazed pots with pussy willow, curly copper willow, and German boxwood

wood box with pussy willow, German boxwood, incense cedar and variegated boxwood

alarge low container with alder branches, taupe eucalyptus, cone picks and mixed greens

custom container made by Branch with birch branches, cone picks, white and pale green eucalyptus and mixed greens

small winter container

the garland is up at the shop! We should be able to finish by the end of next week.

Save

Posted on: December 17, 2016 29 Comments

Filed Under: Holiday, Winter, Deborah Silver and Co Inc

The Gift Of The Season

Those of you have have read this journal regularly over the past 7 years probably recognize my landscape at home. I post pictures of it often, as I find that almost every issue that concerns, delights, or challenges me as a designer are right there brewing in my own back yard. Most every day, I tour my landscape, as there is always something to see and reflect upon. That daily tour sustains me in a way I cannot really explain. I have taken these steps up to my rose garden countless times over the past 20 years. Buck and I, accompanied by the corgis, would make the trip at the end of every day, during the gardening season. In the summer season, we took the steps up in anticipation of the roses, the beautifully aging boxwood hedges, and the quiet. We quit going the year that the extreme winter cold all but killed the roses. The devastation was very tough to take. But late in that summer, we resumed our trips. The white Japanese anemone Honorine Jobert came on strong, swept through the devastated roses, and went on to bloom in profusion for weeks. It was a happening. The four of us celebrated the gift of the season. That next winter that killed all of the last of the life left in my roses was even harder to take. But the anemones were all that much stronger, and all that much more beautiful. Every season has its heartaches, but it is equally true that every season has its gifts. Pictured above is the view of those steps a few nights ago, just after Dan and his crew had been there to install a tree in the pot.

The giant pot in my rose garden organizes that small space, several seasons of the year. I plant it for summer, and for winter. The winter season is at hand. I have for many years installed a cut and lighted Christmas tree in that pot. This year’s tree was incredibly large. My landscape superintendent Dan did not blink. That giant tree dressed with thousands of lights makes me happy. Thousands of lights? Rob’s Lumineo lights from the Netherlands means that my thousands of lights from 8 strands draw next to no electricity. They are good for 50,000 hours, or ten years. I told Dan to fire up the tree. Milo and I made the trek up those stairs that night to see the tree. I was enchanted.

By the next late afternoon, we had had our first snow. It was a big snow. I trudged through 10 inches of that snow after work to see my tree. I was not so keen to walk up the stairs. What nature engineers does not need my foot prints. I like my snow exactly as nature intended it. These LED lights generate very little in the way of heat. The light and the snow were equally compelling. The relationship established by the tree, the snow, the lights and the landscape-perfect.