I look forward to the “Home & Garden” section of the Sunday edition of our local paper. It features different articles written by my long-time friend Lorraine Kiefer – her family owns and operates the very large Triple Oaks Nursery, garden center and flower shop near here.
Lorraine is well known for her knowledge and writings about herbs, flowers and plants, especially those native to this area. Her flower and wreath arrangements are beautiful.
This week’s article featured information about how they make, design and decorate their holiday wreaths.
Lorraine started making wreaths as a 4-H project over 50 years ago. She continued to make holiday wreaths all through college.
Today her family trims and prunes their evergreen trees and shrubs this time of the year (late fall) so they have lots of trimmings to make wreaths. They have an outdoor area and a shed with a wood stove for this big job. Spruce pine and fir greens are used to make the bare wreaths. Other greens and plant trimmings are used to make special wreaths.
Lorraine’s husband Ted and their boys have all made wreaths over the years. Today they use a wreath form and a table form with clamps to speed up this holiday job. Hands full of greens are put into the clamps, a foot pedal is used to close the clamps around the greens, continue around the wire circle and finish the last clamp by putting the greens under the first group of greens.
Lorraine prefers to keep her wreaths as natural as possible. She uses pine cones, magnolia leaves, holly, winter berry and the blue berried cedar. Her bird wreaths are full of fruits and seeds for winter’s hungry birds.
I used to make wreaths for a neighbor and I love the smell of the greens. It smells like Christmas. The beautiful evergreen wreaths are a symbol of eternity. Merry Christmas!
Our Food Link 