The Early Show

Holiday Decorating Ideas

By Tatiana Morales

November 30, 2005 / 12:57 PM EST / CBS

As you start decking the halls and home for the holiday season, you may be looking to add some excitement to the traditional seasonal plants and greenery.

David Stark, event planner and co-author of the new book "To Have & To Hold," visits The Early Show to share original gardening ideas that will turn any room into a sensational holiday space.

Plants are a really cost-effective option for holiday decorating and longevity. It's not all about flowers. The following are Starks' tips:

Harvesting Indoor Garden:

There is beautiful seasonal foliage and flowers that you can make arrangements with that will look unusual and seasonal. They can be plants you already own or things you buy for the season that will keep on giving whenever you need to make an arrangement because you can continue to cut from them throughout the season.

You may also use harvested things from the outdoors, such as evergreens, nuts and berries.

The arrangement featured on the show has begonia leaves, different kinds of ferns, evergreens, amaryllis and cyclamen. These plants are commonly available from a flower shop as well as hardware stores and supermarkets. Best of all, they are inexpensive.

Customizing Containers:

It is easy to customized holders for your plants at home, as well as dress up the traditional store-bought plants you see everywhere.

The materials used to create some of these containers include cinnamon sticks, magnolia leaves and birch bark. You may buy a regular poinsettia for $1.99 to $5.99 and make it special by using a nice container.

Some of the materials you will need to customize the containers are a glue gun, ribbon, and tape.

Still-Lifes:

The look is a series of potted miniature trees with some fake snow that's dusted on. Birch logs are used as little risers to create different levels. The trees are mostly the same height, but part of the trick is to vary the height, so you take cross-section of a log and raise an element up higher on it. Also to decorate, use glass ball ornaments on the still-life.

An easy aspect to this arrangement is to take an oversized pine cone and put it in a pot, as if it was a plant, and cluster these with the trees.

You use the still-life to decorate your dining room table as centerpiece, the fireplace mantel, a side table or a buffet table.

Stark says one of the great things about this still-life idea as the centerpiece is that it's a built-in thing that you can break down and give to guests when they leave. Also, you can get a whole season or at least a month out of these materials, unlike flowers where you get about three to five days. Additionally, you can plant the pine cones, either outside or in a window box, in the spring, they'll be real trees. Overall, the best thing about this is that it's not disposable decor.

For more ideas, here is an excerpt from the book, "To Have & To Hold":

Fiery Glamour Mimosa

The flowers and foliage of the mimosa tree constitute some of the most amazing of nature's floral offerings. Brilliantly fragranced, these yellow-green flowers, native to Australia, were imported to the Mediterranean regions of Europe in the mid-19th century. A popular roadside planting, they are now among the area's most common flowers.

In many parts of Europe, especially Italy, this is a flower given on Festa della Donna (Women's Day), and it is so strongly identified with that holiday that it rarely has the opportunity to step out and shine for other occasions. Like other flowers casually stigmatized, we love it and use it and do so with pleasure, but it remains exotic here, and rarely is the connection made between brunch's favorite cocktail and the source of its elegant name.

When mimosa flowers brilliant yellow, blossoms akin to pompons fill whole branches with glowing light. Before they open, however, the buds are tightly packed, bright yellow beads, with hundreds on a single branch, beautiful in their own right. The moral of this story is that all stages of a flower can offer beautiful possibilities, so when you're selecting a flower, think beyond the blossom to achieve the look you desire.