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Real plants optimal for outdoor decor Revive and naturalize the holidays Susan Semenak Postmedia News Can Christmas decoration be bling-free? To the legions of eager holiday decorators who pore through the Canadian Tire weekly flyer for the newest shooting-star icicle lights or six-foot tinsel-wrapped palm trees, the answer is no. So, too, for the ho-ho-happy neighbours who, right after Halloween, gave the street a “holiday glow” with their miles of multicoloured rope lights and giant airblown Santas, Rudolphs, Frostys and Snoopys. “Usually I have pretty good taste. But at Christmas I get all kitschy and flashy. Like a kid, I am drawn to all that glitters and shines,” confides Sarah Dufresne, who has just stacked her cart at Home Depot with a five-foot pre-lit
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Faux-moss balls with cedar and boxwood greens at Susan Semenak’s home in the Lachine borough of Montreal. sleigh-pulling reindeer that is destined to graze on her Quebec lawn until February. “I can’t help it.” There are those with more subdued tastes, though, who don’t go in for bling, flash and sparkle. It’s not that he’s anti-Christmas, but floral designer Vincent Brochu prefers a more secular “winter theme” for his outdoor arrangements, one that relies on indigenous materials and the colours and textures found in nature for a softer, wilder aesthetic. It’s a look that endures even
after the holidays, once the poinsettias and candy canes are passe. “People rely on silk flowers, bright red fake poinsettias and plastic baubles to give a Christmas look to their homes. But all the colours and textures are often just too fake. Too much. Too unreal,” he says. Naturalists like Brochu look not to the North Pole, but to Quebec’s dramatic winter landscapes for inspiration. They gather branches and birch logs, evergreen boughs and wild berries and hew to
Outdoor balcony arrangement with branches and evergreen by Montreal floral designer Vincent Brochu. the tones and textures of the forest in the balcony arrangements and window boxes they create for themselves and their clients. “I’m just not a ribbon kind of guy. All those bows get crushed and faded, or they blow away,” Brochu says from the counter at Philippe et Vincent, the flower shop he co-owns in Montreal. Already, the counters and work room are filling up with the booty his “pickers” in the countryside have begun bringing in by the boxful.
He favours tall rectangular metal containers in black or verdigris for creating contemporary arrangements of tightly packed twigs for a narrow entryway. He’ll gather bunches of long, thin willow or dogwood branches, for example, and fasten them tightly. He fits them snugly into the container and then clips them in a straight line across the top to form a column. If he wants a little colour, he will find it in the mahogany-red bark of Siberian dog-
wood branches or a stalk of fire-engine red ilex berries. For a little flash, he might tuck a set of unicoloured mini lights into the evergreen branches or mosses at the base of his arrangement. For a little whimsy, on a covered balcony protected from the elements, he might add a few hanging ornaments to an arrangement of bare branches. But they, too, will be natural — either star-shaped birch bark ornaments or moss or bark-covered balls. Over at Folle Avoine, in Montreal’s Little Italy, the flower shop’s owner, Michel L’Heureux, has been busy for two weeks creating outdoor arrangements ranging in price from $200 to $500 for his residential and commercial clients. Cast-iron urns are his signature bases. He likes them for their heft (they are too heavy to be blown down in a storm) and their classic beauty. Their footed bases also foster the illusion of height and grandeur — and they keep the branches and greens out of the accumulating snow.
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