It’s Friday and that calls for giving into my impulse to grab those branches on the ground outside and bring them in to decorate with.
It only took about two minutes to gather up a great heaping armful of branches. Another two minutes in the office kitchen had them sorted by length and quickly dropped into vases. Honestly, they arrange themselves. It takes longer to write a blog post than it does to bring the remains of your pruning inside to cheer up your space!
One armful of branches made three separate vases worth of arrangements. I quickly sorted them just by putting them into short, medium, and tall vases as I went.
Big branches have a lot of drama all on their own. They look great in very simple containers. Don’t crowd them too much – you want their sculptural qualities to have room to express themselves.
The littlest branches I gathered went into an earthy turquoise vase that really plays up their subtle burgundy tone. The scale of this arrangement was just right for the tabletop in our office kitchen. I originally had the medium length branches here, but they were too tall and made the table feel uninviting for sitting.
So the medium length branches went to live in the windowsill of Lesley’s office. The Japanese slab vase I found for them complements the mustard velvet sofa!
Lindsey works at Weston Miles Architects as a sustainability coordinator and part-time blog and website guru, among other tasks. She is formally educated in passive energy conservation and design, but is an environmental enthusiast in pretty much all areas one can be.