This is the second arrangement I made for my pre-Holiday week in San Francisco in my quick/easy/inexpensive Holiday decorating experiment. (The first was the table arrangement detailed in my December 24 post.) You may recall that the rules of the game were that all of the materials had to be purchased in a single outing from very convenient sources, the assembly had to be straightforward, and the total cost limited to about $50.
These were the materials I came home with: hazelnuts and ilex berries (used in the table arrangement) and branches of bay, pine and eucalyptus.
For this arrangement, I just put branches of the bay, pine and eucalyptus in a vase I had on hand and let them arrange themselves according to their natural inclinations: the bay stood upright, the pine drooped gracefully, and the eucalyptus bunched at the base. I adjusted the branches’ heights a bit, pruned here and there, gave the whole thing a good shake, and this is what I ended up with. My bunch of branches actually yielded two arrangements like this, one for the dining room and one for my study.
Particularly for the Holidays, one could glam this up with ilex berries or maybe a cluster of white flowers such as calla lillies, but I chose to leave it all green to keep the focus on the contrasting textures and beautiful fragrances of these plants. Also, I think an all-evergreen arrangement looks great well into January, while the red/green/white formula should probably be retired shortly after New Year’s Day.
Here it is in place on the sideboard in our San Francisco dining room.
