Country Christmas Decorating: How to Make a Foraged Christmas Wreath

I'm Sally Coulthard. I'm an author and smallholder and have spent two decades building the good life with my family and animals in the Yorkshire countryside. Welcome to A Foraged Christmas. In this episode I'll be visiting my local woodland to collect natural materials for crafting sustainable but completely beautiful Christmas decorations. I've come to my local woodland where I know there's lots of lovely foliage. If you're foraging on private land always ask the landowners permission. Never dig up living plants and always leave plenty of berries and leaves for the animals who make the woodland their home. Now really you only need two essential bits of kit for foraging. One is a trug. Some kind of flat bottom basket is perfect. What you don't want to be doing is trying to stick all your stems and foliage into something with narrow sides. So this is my one of my foraging baskets. Really simple not expensive and actually what it allows me to do is just to tuck things under the handle really easily. So my second bit of trusty kit is my secateurs. I really rely on these for pruning around the garden and when I come foraging they're absolutely invaluable. Basically you buy the best that you can afford and they'll last a lifetime. These are beautifully sharp but also really tough and I can get through some fairly tricky branches and leaves with these so a pair of secateurs is what you really need. Now one of the plants that I never feel guilty about taking from woodland is ivy. It's absolutely everywhere and often can overwhelm some of the trees so I'm very happy to take a handful or two home. I find it's a really interesting plant especially with all these beautiful berries. This is going to be perfect for my Christmas wreath but I'll probably dot a few pieces around the house as well maybe on the mantelpiece or I sometimes like to weave the ivy up and down the staircase. I do find it dries out quite quickly so I'm also going to use a different type of ivy which lasts a lot longer. This I'll probably get maybe five or seven days out of before it starts to curl and look a bit dry. In medieval times people often associated ivy with women and the holly was associated with men and so there are lots of interesting and sometimes quite bawdy hymns about the holly and the ivy and the fact that they were supposed to represent the feminine and the masculine brought together. I absolutely love using holly for Christmas decorations. It's so green and vibrant and it's pretty robust actually and should last a good 10 days to two weeks in the house. The main things that make Christmas foliage dry out is central heating so if you can bear to either don't have the heating on too hot or put them in part of the house that is quite cool. Luckily we live in a farmhouse that's really cold so this will probably last for three weeks. I'm really keen on responsible foraging and one of the things I won't be collecting this Christmas is moss. I absolutely love this stuff but really thanks to over harvesting for things like florists wreaths and Christmas decorations a lot of woodlands have really suffered and had moss cleared from their floors so I won't be collecting moss from the forest floor. I'll leave it and if you want to use moss probably best buy it from florist supplies where you know it's been sustainably sourced. So when you're foraging for Christmas decorations you don't always have to go for the obvious like holly and ivy. Sometimes I like to look around and see what else I can find in the woodland. Now this is a really interesting plant this is box leaf honeysuckle and really it's a garden shrub but just occasionally you find that it's made an escape and come out into the countryside and here in the woodland it's naturalized so I like to take just a few bits and it's brilliant because it brings lots of nice green color these tiny beautiful shine leaves and they're great for adding to wreaths just a bit of architectural interest and these also are quite long lasting as well you should get a week or so out of these. So I just wanted to show you this plant which is not one that we traditionally associate with Christmas but this is spindle and it's a woodland plant but it really comes into its own this time of the year with these amazing hot pink berries that have in their hearts tiny orange flashes of color it's absolutely beautiful and actually would look brilliant in a wreath but I'm not going to collect it this year because this particular tree doesn't have that many berries on this year so I'm going to leave those for the birds so they can have a good Christmas too. After a really successful foraging trip I thought I'd show you a really simple wreath that you can make for Christmas. I tend not to use metal wreaths I like using these natural ones because you don't have to use florist pins the kind of natural form of the wreath allows you to tuck things in just under these lovely vines. I think this is a great vine wreath and you can pick these up for just a couple of pounds at a craft shop and you can get them in different sizes and the great thing is you can reuse them year on year and then when you're finished and they're a bit tatty you can just put them on the compost heap. I usually use about three different types of foliage and they each bring something different to the wreath. I use the fir as the background because it's very dense but it's got a lovely feathery texture but you can use other things for the same purpose so here I've got some fern that we picked yesterday that was the box leaf honeysuckle that we got you could use Christmas tree you could use yew all those plants share similar qualities and they're lovely and dense and they have lovely shiny foliage. What I want to do is just create a really dense background so to do that I take short lengths of these and I start tucking them into the wreath and I like to chase them around as they go so that they're all pointing in the same direction I think it gives a kind of natural rhythm just keep moving it around as I go. This is my second ingredient and this is trailing ivy I absolutely love this it has such movement to it and when you're using it in a wreath you can make it kind of crawl around the wreath and wind its way around and it looks almost like the wreath is alive. All I need to do is strip off the last few leaves and creating a nice stalk that you can then firmly tuck into because it's so used to being winding around walls it will very easily just wrap beautifully around the wreath and then when you get to the point you don't want to wrap it too tightly just tuck the end in. So the best bit now is adding the pops of colour and those I'm going to bring using berries we forage for berries in the woodland but I also like to collect berries from lots of different places so you can use hawthorn now this grows very freely in lots of hedgerows and I often stop the car and leap out with a pair of secateurs and just pick off a few they have really sharp spikes and you have to be quite careful but I love the colour of these but for this wreath I'm actually going to use something that grows just around the farm we planted quite a few mountain ash trees when we first arrived here and I love these berries they are dirty pink they're beautiful yellowy muted pink and I think these look absolutely gorgeous on the wreath they pick out the slight pinkness of the of the ivy which is really nice so what I like to do is just because they're quite heavy I don't I wouldn't use a whole sprig like that I'd probably just pick off a little section like that just trim off any bits that aren't very nice and then find a suitable spot on the on the wreath just tuck it in now I like to use real berries and there's a good reason for this one year when I was in a bit of a hurry and didn't find any berries I used plastic berries on a wreath that I hung outside on the farmhouse door and to my horror the poor birds were trying to eat the berries so I vowed never to use plastic berries ever again on any on any wreath I hang outdoors so I'm just gonna literally go around and try not to make things too even I think with wreaths if things are very symmetrical it can feel a bit forced actually what you're wanting is for it to feel very natural it's a kind of imperfect symmetry it wants to look not too perfect there we go Christmas wreath now you can use wreaths around the house in lots of different places I tend to put them on the front door the back door you could also use it as a table centre I sometimes put these in the middle of a dining table or even in the middle of the Christmas meal and it looks absolutely glorious especially if you've got candles dotted in between now this should probably last indoors about a week or two weeks before it starts to look a bit tired outdoors you'll you'll get a good three weeks out of this but if you want to refresh things it's really easy and all these three plants that I've chosen today the fir the ivy and the rowan berries will carry on growing they'll be growing outside way into the end of December so if you want you could just nip outside pick a bit extra and refresh the wreath so continuing with the forage theme I brought some of the rest of the things that we brought back from the woodland I'm going to use them to create a gorgeous seasonal display for the top of the mantelpiece so I'm going to start off these are hawthorn berries I love these because they get long stiff branches perfect starting off the arrangement so I'm just going to use one here and what's lovely about these is that you can actually make them extend off the end of the mantelpiece another one here just watching out for the decorations now I tend to use things in fives threes or other odd numbers it just seems to really work visually so I'm just very gently placing these I like the fact that they make really random shapes it adds to the natural look that you're going for the second piece of forage that I want to use is this and I noticed this year that eucalyptus was really expensive and we actually don't grow it here on the farm but a really good alternative and one that you're probably more likely to find around a garden or in a woodland is this and it's evergreen oak and I absolutely love it not only is it a native species but it has this beautiful silvery leaf a kind of two-tone it gives a kind of two-tone effect so it's a great alternative to eucalyptus if you're finding that it's really expensive so with this I'll probably just trim a bit a few bits down I don't want to use such a big piece so I'm just going to trim that off I'm just going to start really casually layering these around you can hide any bits of awkward stem behind other pieces of leaves just start placing around you don't want to hide the berries too much because they're always the star of the show now one of the good things about using these types of forage foliage is that they're pretty robust and in a hot room like this one the fire can get really warm you need something that can cope with the drying effects of a fire plants lose water through their leaves and so it's really important to have a room that's not too hot or dry and they'll keep much much longer doesn't matter if the odd berry falls off or it looks a bit unruly you can just snip as you go so this is the ivy that we foraged in the woodland I love the they're almost like baubles and I'm going to use a few bits of this just building up the layers it wants to feel almost foresty and it's loose and casual and that the plants are really growing around each other I also like to have bits that trail off the end of the mantelpiece it gives a feeling that it's almost slightly out of control and I love that about nature now we're going to add another kind of berry this is the spiky version and this is great because it adds real Christmas feeling pile on the holly now the holly this year has been absolutely amazing I don't know why I don't know if it's because we had a really hot June followed by a wet August so the berries had chance to fill out but they are laden this year which is really nice because often hunting for holly can be a bit of a thankless task but luckily this year we've got loads to work with and then we've got one last thing I'm going to add to the arrangement now these weren't foraged from the woodland but I picked these a couple of weeks ago in the garden and they've been slowly drying in the boot room gorgeous hydrangeas lovely pom-pom visual effect the colors are gorgeous we've got lime greens gentle kind of purpley reds and I'm just going to place those they're like almost like full stops in the arrangement symmetry almost always kills a natural arrangement makes it look too formal I use an odd number of these as well very gently pacing those can be quite fragile so you just want to handle them carefully just bring that one down here it's starting to feel really full and generous I think maybe the last one can go there step back and we're done and now for the finishing touch lighting the candles