Decorating with greenery

Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)(MCT) - It's a 19-year tradition for members of the Ware River Circle of the King's Daughters in Gloucester, Va. Each year, the group of almost 30 women finds a host willing to accommodate a holiday tea that attracts hundreds of patrons and raises thousands of dollars for the children's hospital. For the event, held last week, Robert and Sandy Hatten opened their home, Colraine, a circa-1848 white frame home overlooking Wilson Creek.

In exchange, circle members took over the house for 12 hours the day before to decorate every nook and cranny. There's no set theme to the decorations. A month earlier the women toured the house to stake out their chosen spot to decorate. The result is a wonderful, eclectic mixture of the traditional, the creative, the quirky and the zany.

It's a scene of organized chaos as the group spreads throughout the two-story home. By noon, the entrance decorations of traditional white-pine roping and wreaths are complete, but there are women on the screened-in porch, in the kitchen, the dining room, the bedrooms and bathrooms, each with their own stash of locally picked greenery _ from their own yards, friends, neighbors and "the property where no-one lives" _ as well as a few crafty additions, such as peacock feathers (purchased from Michaels), Chinese pheasant feathers, bows, fruits and vegetables.

In the den, buckets of greenery await placement on mantels and along bookshelves as well as in free-standing arrangements. There's cedar with blue berries and with yellow, ornamental pear branches with large, perfectly round berries, boxwood, fronds of cryptomeria with just a hint of a cone at the end, Burford holly, the variegated leaves of acuba and abelia, giant dried okra and lotus pods, osage oranges (from a single tree in Ware Neck, Va.), and dried grasses.

In a downstairs bathroom, a dramatic arrangement of bare agastache branches draped with silver balls and jewels has a refreshing spareness. The bar area has another splashy, out-of-the-ordinary display with a grapevine wreath entwined with glued-on corks and a red-clad "Lady New Year" riding a sleigh made from wine bottles. In the dining room, Wanda Friend and Jan Price work on a creative rendition of a peacock with boxwood tucked into a shaped oasis, with pine-cone wings and a cranberry crown. The design picks up the colors and patterns of the room's carpet.

Other arrangements complement the colors and subjects of the art work, both traditional and contemporary, and the stained glass panels in the living room.

Everywhere there are little sprigs of holly nestled next to magnolia leaves and cones as well as the "flowers" from the diadora tree. The tree's cones are layered, but delicate, and typically fall apart when picked, but Shannah Cooper has found a way to preserve them by super-gluing them and placing a toothpick through the center.

The containers, too, are imaginative, ranging from a chicken feeding trough, now disguised and covered by its contents, to a curly-toed glittering boot showcased in a vegetable arrangement in the kitchen.

"There's no coordinated plan. It just works," says decorating chair Mary Ann Griffith.

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© 2008, Daily Press (Newport News, Va.).