Find elements for a holiday centerpiece in your own backyard

With so much to worry about, so much stress all around us, Thanksgiving provides the opportunity we need to share with our friends and family the many things all Americans have to be thankful about - including the beauty of nature.

This holiday season, despite all these concerns, most of us will still strive to provide family and other invited guests with a warm and inviting atmosphere in which to enjoy a tasty meal at a table you have set with pride. Tablescapes should include a cheerful and seasonal table centerpiece, and this year we wanted to show you how to create that centerpiece, spending little or no money by using nature's bounty from your own yard.

We challenged Lonnie Taylor, lead designer at the newly opened Fiore Fine Flowers on Wrightsville Avenue, to create just such a Thanksgiving table centerpiece. His orders? 90 percent of it must consist of foliage and flowers, seed pods from my own garden. He could spend only up to $15 on additional plant material.

I encourage you to look around your own garden, picking out not just the obvious dried hydrangea heads or red maple leaves but beautiful shiny green leaves (fatsia and gardenias are perfect examples), textured foliage such as that on rosemary, trailing plants (you may have hardy vinca or ivy in your yard), and other natural elements such as cones and seed pods. Taylor made good use of the sprigs of crape myrtle I gave him, and their dark brown seed heads added to the tapestry of the final design.

As for that $15, Taylor spent it on sunflowers and yellow-tipped bronze daisies that he used as focal points in the design.

If our finished centerpiece looks a little old-fashioned to you, it's all by design. "We are going into a Victorian age ... with flower design," Taylor said. Appropriate, too, because Thanksgiving is a time for tradition and nostalgia.

Lonnie Taylor of Fiore Fine Flowers offers these tips for designing your centerpiece:

1. Cut your oasis to size and then drop it gently in a sink filled with water and allow it to float – don’t push it down – until it fills with water naturally. It will absorb more water this way.

2. Before inserting stems into the oasis, cut the ends on a slant and insert them at least ½ way into the oasis.

3. Never pull stems/branches out once you have put them in the oasis; it will start to crumble and break down. If you make a mistake, cut off the stem level with the oasis and start again.

4. Any cut flower or foliage stem that has been out of water for more than seven minutes should be re-cut.

5. For a table centerpiece, remember to keep the arrangement low so that your guests can see over the top.

6. Only let the container show if it is attractive; otherwise it, and the oasis, should be hidden completely by foliage or flowers.

7. It’s best to remove the thorns from your foliage or flowers – like the pyracantha in our centerpiece – as you don’t want your guests to get impaled on them by mistake.

8. Decide on a color scheme and stick with it throughout your design. Why did Lonnie Taylor choose those particular flowers? “Sunflowers scream Thanksgiving to me,” he said. “And the daisies are in those wonderful fall colors.”

9. “Balance is so important in a design,” he said. So stand back and make sure your design is balanced before putting the finishing touches.

Some of the items used in our centerpiece, all of which were from Susan Hart’s garden, have since been caught by the frost, but you can still find plenty of other plant material if you look around and use your imagination – and there are always pansies for color: rosemary, lantana (a few orange/red blooms remained on the stems), fatsia leaves, fatsia ‘flowers,’ gardenia foliage, loropetalum foliage, pyracantha berries, crape myrtle, River Birch, Wild Cherry, sweet potato plant leaves, abelia, cedar bush branches, American Beauty Bush berries and sycamore tree seed pods. Alternative materials to look for include: Camellia leaves (and blossoms), nandina berries, sedum, parsley, shells, driftwood, moss and Spanish moss.