Evergreen boughs bring lively green color and fresh scents into your home over the holidays. But if we’re not careful, the branches easily dry out and leave us with a mess of needles instead of a beautiful live wreath or fresh-cut centerpiece. So how do you preserve your evergreen cuttings? The key is to start with moist evergreen branches and preserve as much moisture as you can—use these expert tips to keep your evergreen fresh!
How to Give Evergreen Cuttings a Fresh Start
1. Choose Fresh Evergreen Boughs
How to identify the freshest evergreen cuttings is by their scent and feel. Fresh-cut boughs keep their needles when you shake them, have a healthy color of green, and hold the scent of the tree they came from. Just trust your senses. Selecting fresh cuttings is the first step to preserving evergreens throughout the holidays.
2. Rehydrate Your Evergreen Cuttings
When you bring your boughs home, cut a half-inch off the stems on an angle with a clean pair of pruners and soak them in water for 24 hours. This spa treatment helps rehydrate the cuttings after they have been sitting on display and boosts the moisture before you use them. You can even rehydrate a wreath by letting it sit in a few inches of water before you hang it up.
1. Keep Them in Water or Moist Florist Foam
Depending on the decoration at hand, sticking the ends in water or something moist, like florist foam, preserves them for longer. This is easier to do in certain crafts like a table centerpiece.
2. Mist Your Cuttings
A spray of water can do wonders to preserve your evergreens throughout Christmas. A spritz of moisture every day helps them stay refreshed, and the added humidity carries those sweet scents of cedar and balsam fir into the air.
3. Keep Them Away from Heat and Direct Sun
Heat from a fireplace or house vent quickens the demise of your boughs of evergreen. Even direct sunlight, or radiant heat from incandescent bulbs, dries the needles more quickly. If possible, keep them in cool, shady places, and use LED lights for decoration.
4. Spray Them With Anti-Desiccant
If you found your cuttings easily dried out in past years, you might consider spraying them with an anti-desiccant. These products seal the pores in the needles and bark and preserve the moisture inside the boughs and helps with evergreen bough distress.
How to Cut Evergreen Boughs Yourself
Cutting evergreen boughs from your own trees comes with a few perks. For one, you know they’re fresh. And two, they’re from trees that are adapted to our climate. That gives them a head start on preservation from the beginning. Just remember to wait until temperatures drop—ideally below freezing—before cutting them. Also, choose boughs from around the back of the tree or in a place where the cuts are out of view.
The reason why evergreens can keep their leaves all winter is because their needles are already adapted to hold moisture inside better than a broad leaf. When we bring the boughs indoors, all we have to do is start thinking like an evergreen and take every opportunity to keep the water in those needles. That’s how you preserve evergreen cuttings and how you keep your decorations green throughout the holidays. Don’t forget to thank the evergreens for letting us use their beautiful boughs!
Platt Hill Nursery is Chicago’s premier garden center and nursery in the Chicagoland area.