Bringing a little of the outside inside



Holly

At this time of year I go into a kind of torpur - my hibernating instincts come to the fore and I hardly seem to leave the house.  Any visits to the garden consist of hurrying up the garden path to the compost bin, averting my eyes and carefully avoiding looking at the flower beds which need attention.  The not-so-statuesque seedheads which, according to most professional gardeners, should be left over winter to look beautiful when frosted, only look rather sad and soggy.

The only time I perk up is when it is time to look around the garden for foliage and berries to bring indoors for decorating the house for Christmas.  Luckily, I have a plethora of plants with berries and interesting foliage and lots of ivy  - you know, things that you wouldn't necessarily notice at any other time of year.



table decoration

For me, reds and greens epitomise Christmas and I like to make full use of what is available a couple of days prior.  I won't be bringing the foliage in too early as it tends to dry out fairly quickly in the warm conditions of the house.  A display along the mantlepiece of cotoneaster, pyracantha, holly and trailing ivy highlighted with the white flowers of the viburnam is a sight for sore eyes in the gloom of a dark winters' day.

cotoneaster



pyracantha

So all I have to do now is assemble all my ingredients and start cooking up a decorative Christmas storm.



redoitdesign

When I am not Dreaming of a White Christmas I spend my time putting the house to rights, it gets sadly neglected over the summer gardening months, so out comes the feather duster and long reach brushes to try to de-cobweb all the corners where house spiders have most inconveniently built their little fly traps.  They seem to come back pretty frequently as though they are sticking their tongues out and saying 'catch me if you can'. 

I did manage to rally myself and get all last years seed packets out to see what needed ordering for this year, thankfully very little - it seems I went a bit overboard last year and still have plenty of everything, including half a dozen packets of radish seed!  Give me a rack of colourful seed packets and I seem to lose all reason.

A lot of reading gets done over the winter months and gardening books collected in order to inspire me for the coming gardening season.  I have lots of plans going round in my little brain for what I want to achieve but I realise that I actually need the winter wind-down in order to be able to appreciate the coming spring and the hectic schedule in front of me when the weather takes a turn for the better.