When you walk into our Plaza area this time of year, chances are the first thing you’ll do is stop and take a big, deep breath of that invigorating evergreen scent. We do it too – we can’t help it either. It’s one of the best scents of the season, and we have our collection of 12 fresh-cut wintergreen boughs to thank for it. Our Container Design team has been hard at work cutting and arranging our wintergreens into indoor and outdoor containers, centerpieces, and more. Whether it’s a fir, pine, cedar, or spruce, every one of our boughs has its own character and style, and each has a special role to play in your holiday decorating projects – and we’d love for you to meet them.
The Firs
As a group, firs are prized for their fragrance and versatility in design projects, and our selection of fir boughs includes noble, silver, and Douglas. In planters, their sturdy branches can stand tall as a central focal point or you can cut them at strategic places along the stem to create shorter fan-shaped pieces to fill in anywhere in the arrangement. Noble fir needles are a deep blue-green on both sides of the bough, but when you use silver fir, be sure to flip it over – the underside is a silvery-blue. (It’s like a two-for-one color bonus with each branch.) Noble and silver firs last a long time, indoors and out, so they’re a favorite in fresh-cut wreaths, centerpieces, and garlands too.
Although Douglas fir boughs share a similar structure with the others, this “fir” belongs to a different genus, so it has some differences too. Douglas has a fresh, spring green color and its needles are slender and soft, almost pine-like. It also works better in outdoor containers where it can stay cool and enjoy the moisture from snow and drizzle.
The Cedars
Port Orford, Leyland, incense, and blueberry make up our selection of fragrant cedars. Cedar foliage is flat and soft – a nice texture change when mixed with the needle-like foliage of firs and pine. Although they seem quite similar, Port Orford and Leyland cedars have key differences that help them contribute in their own ways to fresh-cut projects – Port Orford is brighter green and tends to be more fan-shaped and flexible while Leyland is bluish-green and upright. Incense cedar has fresh, yellow-green foliage with masses of tiny yellow cones that give a nice pop of bright color. Incense is famous for its drooping habit too – a valued trait when you want something to trail over the edges of an arrangement.
Like Douglas fir, blueberry cedar’s common name hides the fact that this beautiful little evergreen is really a type of juniper. So, it has some features that set it apart from the other cedars in the group. Blueberry cedar is shorter and shrub-like, so it’s perfect for smaller projects like wreaths and centerpieces, but it’s also great at filling in lower areas in larger arrangements too. Its foliage is a beautiful blue-green and often loaded with little purple-blue berries – instant ornaments on every bough.
Princess Pine
Like our firs, Princess pine has long, sturdy boughs that can stand tall in an arrangement or can be clipped into shorter lengths to add soft, touchable texture anywhere in large and small projects. Princess pine’s slender needles are arranged in long plumes and have a fresh, yellowish-green hue which works beautifully mixed with darker greens like noble and silver fir.
Spruce Tops
Spruce tops look like miniature Christmas trees with sage green foliage. Instead of being bundled like our other greens, spruce tops come individually in heights from two to six feet. Used singly or in groups, they create instant height in any outdoor container, large or small. (For a signature alpine look in outdoor planters, we like to group white birch poles with two or more spruce tops in different heights.) Spruce tops dry faster than other wintergreens, though, so they work best in outdoor containers where the cold, wet weather keeps them beautiful longer.
Bring Home That Lovely Scent
There’s nothing like the scent of fresh-cut wintergreens to put us in the holiday spirit. Just step into our Plaza and see what we mean. There, you’ll find individual bundles of all our beautiful wintergreens plus mixed-variety bundles sized perfectly to fill our three most popular sizes of planters. You’ll also find all the fiber pots, soil, outdoor-friendly ornaments, and lifelike floral stems you need to complete any project. Or, if you’d rather leave the clipping to us, we have pre-made wintergreen planters in three sizes, fresh wreaths, and garlands too. And we take custom orders – just ask the Container Design team at their desk located right there in the Plaza. Wherever you enjoy your wintergreens – in a planter, in a vase, or along your mantel – we hope you’ll relish that heavenly scent as much as we do.
