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A Joyful Guide to Holiday Decorating with Winter Berries

Winter berries

Homemade holiday decorations make your home feel a little cozier, warmer, and personal. At Cascade Floral Wholesale, creating brilliant arrangements, wreaths, garlands, and more live décor for your home or special event is what we’re all about. There is nothing more festive or versatile during the holiday season than winter berries. From American Holly and Winterberry to Hypericum and Brunia Berry, the tiny red, green, white, or silver berries add a new texture and dimension to just about anything.

Fun Ways to Decorate for the Holidays with Winter Berries

Winter floral arrangement with hypericum berries

Accent Flowers with Berries

 Holiday and winter floral arrangements bring life to our dinner tables, add a refreshing touch to our living rooms, or brighten up a loved one’s day when presented as a gift. This season, red, white, green, and silver berries are cheerful additions to seasonal flower designs, especially those made of lush greenery, crisp white blooms, and radiant red flowers. Because of their small, compact size, winter berries will entice the eye when nestled among large petals and fluffy textures.

Red hypericum berries in a vase

Arrange Berries in a Stylish Vase

Whether you love a classic holiday look with lots of greenery or a minimalistic aesthetic, berries bring a warm and festive touch to any space, no matter your style. Collect only a few stems of winter berries to place in a tall, sleek vase for a perfect minimalist look, or brighten a bundle of eucalyptus, ruscus, magnolia foliage, myrtle, cedar, or pine with pops of festive berries.

Putting winter berries in Christmas wreath

Adorn Holiday Wreaths & Fresh Garland

Holiday wreaths for your front door or above your fireplace are usually decorated with fresh evergreens, pinecones, flocking, and ribbons of all sorts of patterns and seasonal hues. The same can be said for garlands that hang above doorways or lay across a mantel or table. Like the floral arrangements and ornate vases, winter berries are always a wonderful addition. However, you can also create wreaths and garland straight from winter berries, creating a clean, put-together, bright, and energizing wreath or string of garland for your home.

Decorating the Christmas tree with winter berries

Decorate the Christmas Tree

One of our favorite holiday trends is swapping a few ornaments on your Christmas tree for holiday blooms and berries. Leaning into Mother Nature’s gifts and the fresh, crisp look, feel, and scents of the outdoors is simply magical. While meticulously adorning your Christmas tree with red and white flowers or a collection of red, white, and silver berries, the tree topper surely needs to match the rest of the tree. Gather your favorite winter berries and fasten a luxurious homemade design to the top of your Christmas tree.  

Welcoming and inviting place setting with winter berries

Dress Your Holiday Dinner Table

The holiday season wouldn’t be complete without several family dinners and gatherings with friends and loved ones. When it comes time to set the table, wow your guests with a small but impactful detail on their place setting – a small stem of winter berries. With the range of styles, shapes, and colors of berries available, you can coordinate your dishes and linens to offer a beautiful and inviting place for your guests to sit back, relax, and enjoy a meal together.

Tying hypericum berries to Christmas gifts

 Enhance Your Gift Packages

 The final stage of holiday planning and decorating is wrapping presents. Whether you are looking to impress or make your gifts stand out among the rest for a White Elephant or Secret Santa, don’t rely on fancy wrapping paper to do the job. Instead, turn to winter berries for the perfect gift accent to make your presents look elegant and festive.  

Kids crafts with winter berries

Enjoy Arts & Crafts with Your Family

 Winter berries are exceptional plants that can be utilized for a wide range of arts and crafts. From decorative accents that turn homemade Christmas gifts into pieces of art to a fun sensory project for kids, berries are perfect for holiday crafting. Fasten a small sprig to a coffee mug cozy, tie some around a sweet fragrant candle, add a pop of color to cinnamon sticks for decorating gifts or table settings, or have your kids glue each tiny berry to a paper Christmas tree to mimic red, white, and green ornaments. Let your creativity and imagination run wild with winter berries this holiday season.  

Flowers and greenery often steal the spotlight in arrangements and home décor almost all year round. The joy we feel during the holiday season deserves to be celebrated with something different and exciting, like winter berries. Find your favorite berries for holiday decorating and flower bouquets at Cascade Floral Wholesale.

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All About the Kalanchoe

Kalanchoe plant with orange flowers, Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, potted Kalanchoe

What Is a Kalanchoe Plant?

Kalanchoe plants are a type of plant that belongs to the succulent family. There are 125 known Kalanchoe varieties, with the most popular being the Kalanchoe blossfeldiana. The plants vary significantly in appearance, but most display brilliantly colored flowers, which makes them so charming. . The flowers bloom in bunches and range in colors from pink, red, white, orange, or yellow.

As members of the succulent family, Kalanchoe have the typical thick leaves and numerous stems. The plants vary in size, with most reaching up to one to two feet in height and width. However, some treelike species can grow up to 20 feet tall. Kalanchoes bloom for about eight weeks from late autumn to late winter and, as a result, are often seen with other festive houseplants around the holidays. Take note –  kalanchoes are potentially toxic to pets and should be kept well out of their reach.

Kalanchoe plant with orange flowers, Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, potted Kalanchoe

Why Kalanchoes Make Great Houseplants 

Kalanchoe plants are easy to maintain, and they are loved for their many colorful flowers and unique shapes. Due to their low maintenance requirements, they make ideal houseplants. While the most common and easiest to care for, Kalanchoe is the Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, other popular and beautiful varieties  include:

  • The panda plant (Kalanchoe tomentosa).
  • Paddle plant (Kalanchoe thyrsiflora).
  • Mother of thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana).

These Kalanchoe plants are ideal container plants and grow well indoors when properly cared for.

Three colors pots with thee colors medical plants kalanchoe with flowers close up on trendy pink background, bright colors concept

How to Care for Kalanchoes  

Kalanchoes originate from tropical and humid climates, so despite the fact they usually bloom in winter, it is best to keep them in 60-85 degree temperatures as they cannot withstand cold temperatures. If your Kalanchoe has not bloomed yet, ensure it is in a location that receives a significant amount of sunlight. Keep bloomed Kalanchoes in a place where they receive moderate sunlight will keep the flowers blooming longer.

As with most succulents, Kalanchoes do not require as much water as other houseplants. Every few days, check to ensure the soil surface levels are dry before watering the soil to avoid overwatering and leaving water blemishes on the leaves. To encourage blooming, use a clean pair of scissors and cut away smaller blooms at the base of a cluster.

Kalanchoe blossfeldiana is native to the island of Madagascar

Interesting Facts About the Kalanchoe 

  • Kalanchoe plants originate from Southeast Asia and southern Africa and are most prevalent in Madagascar.
  • They were brought to Europe from Madagascar around 1930 by a German man named Robert Blossfield, who is the namesake of the most common Kalanchoe plant, “blossfeldiana.
  • The name “Kalanchoe” comes from the Chinese phrase “Kalan Chau,” which translates to “that which falls and grows,” in reference to the way it spreads.
  • Kalanchoe plants symbolize endurance and lasting affection because of their long-lasting period of blooming.
  • A unique characteristic of Kalanchoes is they have new cells growing on the interior part of their petals which helps make them bloom. These cells also grow on the petal’s exterior to help the flowers close.

Kalanchoe potted plants in four colors of red, yellow and white powder grown in the garden

How to Get a Kalanchoe to Rebloom

The Kalanchoe is known as a “short-day” plant, just like the Christmas cactus, so to get your kalanchoe to rebloom, you’ll need to expose it to lower light levels that mimic shorter days. . Time this with the changing of the seasons as the days get shorter in the late fall. Over the course of a month, begin watering the plant less, if at all. Expose the plants to only eight or nine hours of light a day. Then, put it in a closet in complete darkness for the rest of the time. Once you start to see flower buds, move the houseplant back to its bright light position, and resume watering the plant as you would normally.