There is a long history of bringing live or cut foliage indoors during the winter (see a nice article here). This practice became more common during the Christmas holiday.
I’ve used my share of live wreaths, trees, and garlands as decorating objects. As my decorating style became more “modern,” I gravitated more towards artificial flora and fauna because they tend to offer me more color options.
I knew the Mediterranean Palace theme would pose some challenges on the floral front. Not only did I need to find yellow and blue florals (what?), but I wanted them to feel like they could have come from the Mediterranean countries.
I was aware of a practice held by palace dwellers and the well-to-do that would fit with this theme. The idea of an orangery could be easily replicated, and also seem relevant, to this palace dining room I was creating. In keeping with my color theme, though, our specimen would have to come from the imaginary lemonery (apparently not a thing).
I took one of my gold LED trees (keeping with gold as my metal for this space) and placed some plucked leaves from last year’s plum branches on the twig ends.
I bought 20 faux lemons and glittered them with a transparent pale yellow glitter. I wanted the lemon skin color to come through, but also wanted them to have a “sugared” look.
So if we were to take this tree out of the orangery (or lemonery, maybe it’ll catch on), we’d need to place it in some sort of vessel. Otherwise we’d have a lot of dirt on the floor of our dining room. I used a bejeweled tree collar, but turned it upside down so it would have a bucket shape. I used an empty pot to raise the tree up to the rim (this is a 3 foot LED tree). I then tucked a piece of fabric around the top to cover the mechanics, and to also bring in both the yellow and blue colors of our theme.
The tree has a built-in timer, so I set and let.
Another place for me to bring in florals was on the table. I like to use wreaths as table center pieces. In the case of the dining room the round wreath complements the round table. I considered different materials – evergreen, twig, fabric – and in keeping with our luxe tone I decided to use a faux fur.
I purchased some larger (than used for the tree) faux lemons to incorporate into the wreath. I gave them a light coat of Folk Art®’s Color Shift paint in Yellow. This gave the lemons a metallic sheen, shifting from yellow to orange.
I added vintage berry clusters in Royal Blue, and added a jeweled garland from D.Stevens® for some sparkle.
The Baroque planters I hung on the front wall afforded me vessels for adding more florals to the space. Here I created arrangements using blue and yellow-toned faux florals.
On top of the corner shelf I created a tall arrangement, again in blue and yellow-toned faux florals, and placed on the top of the shelf to stretch the height of the corner space up to the ceiling. I wrapped the stems in a feather boa and let a large portion trail out of the vase.
NEXT Up: Finishing touches