Edible wreaths: A gift that keeps on giving

The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT) - Eileen Boyle takes a bird's-eye view of the fall garden. She sees it as a bountiful buffet of fruits, nuts and seeds.

She won't eat them herself. She'll use them, along with dried apricots and apples, popcorn and Cheerios, to make a holiday wreath that's a treat for birds and a delight for people who like to watch them.

"You'll have birds till February. It's so cool," says Boyle, education coordinator at the nonprofit Mount Cuba Center near Wilmington, Del., which studies and celebrates regional native plants and wildflowers.

Boyle displays her edible handiwork in two gardens. One is in Woodstown, N.J., where she and her husband, a breeder of the famous "Rutgers" tomatoes, live on an acre by a lake.

And one is at Mount Cuba, whose 650 acres are a leafy wonderland in autumn, a wistful brown reminder that another year is slipping away.

No navel-gazing allowed today. Boyle is on a mission. She's foraging for things to put on her holiday wreath, native plants that are good for the home garden all year long.

We head out of the manor house, an elegant Colonial Revival built by Lammot du Pont Copeland and his bride, Pamela Cunningham Copeland, in 1935.

Within minutes, we score:

American holly or "Ilex opaca, Delaware's state tree and an old favorite that looks a fraction of its 70-odd years. It's loaded with distinctive red fruit _ technically, not a berry but a drupe _ that fairly shouts, "Come and get it!" More than 18 bird species, including bobwhites, cedar waxwings and goldfinches, favor this fruit. Like teenagers before an open fridge, they can strip a tree in seconds.

Southern magnolia or "Magnolia grandiflora "Alta," a column-shaped version of this magnificent evergreen. Its generous pods push tiny orange seeds out for easier grazing. Isn't nature amazing?

Winterberry holly or "Ilex verticillata "Winter Gold." Its drama-queen fruits are pumpkiny orange or golden yellow, depending on the week, and do look good enough to eat.

"Scarlett O'Hara," another winterberry with reddish-orange fruits. True fall fireworks! And no kidding, "Rhett Butler" is her pollinator of choice.

Green or Southern hawthorn, known as "Crataegus viridis" or "Winter King." It's quite regal, with reddish fruit, cinnamon bark, and leaves of red, gold and purple.

Smooth witherod viburnum or "Viburnum nudum", "Winterthur." It is prized by gardeners (and birds) for its small fruit, which starts out white and moves to light pink to dark pink to blue to deep purple-black. Pure magic.

At this point, we're rounding the Round Garden and heading for the Woods Path, on the edge of a former cornfield, and here we see it: a collection of American beautyberry or "Callicarpa americana. Boyle couldn't have picked a more splendid finale to her foraging adventure.

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It sounds so ordinary to call this beautiful thing a shrub. Just look at its loose, open form, wandlike branches, and tight clusters of bright purple berries. The aptly named beautyberry is a lean dancer bedecked in jeweled bracelets, wrist to shoulder.

"Doesn't that just knock your socks off?" asks Boyle, formerly the horticulture director at the Philadelphia Zoo and New York Botanical Garden.

It would, if we were wearing socks. But we're not, and it's finally time to get practical. How do you put all this together in a wreath to feed the birds?

Boyle explains.

Buy a plain evergreen wreath, florist picks and wire, and dried fruit. (Boyle dries her own in a dehydrator; you can do this in the oven, too.)

She has used dried apples, apricots, lemons and oranges, and she has threaded wire through banana chips, which soften in the outdoors. Other possibilities: raisins, dried cranberries, pinecones covered in peanut butter and dipped in sunflower seeds, Cheerios, as well as seed pods, acorns and nuts she glues onto the picks.

She attaches everything else to picks with wire and inserts them into the wreath, adding a bow and dried hydrangeas for flair.

Finding a place to hang this can be tricky. Boyle likes a pole in the middle of her meadow at home; squirrels don't like meadows, she says, because they can't see snakes and other scary stuff.

Brian Byrnes of Audubon Pennsylvania suggests a pole (6 to 8 feet tall), 10 feet from trees or fences that might launch a squirrel, and at least 5 feet off the ground. He'd add a squirrel baffle for insurance.

Just don't nail this wreath on a tree or hang it at your home's entrance _ unless you have a storm door. "I wouldn't put it past the squirrels to be sitting on a wreath on your front door," Byrnes says.

You'll want to watch this wreath. Byrnes says there likely will be plenty to see: tufted titmice, Carolina chickadees, downy woodpeckers, cardinals, robins, juncos, goldfinches, white-throated sparrows, bluebirds, mockingbirds and waxwings.

Like bird feeders in winter, an edible wreath is something a little extra, not the difference between life and death, for birds.

"It's a healthy snack for them," says Byrnes.

And truly a treat for us.

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Catherine Bosk took Eileen Boyle's natural holiday-wreath workshop a year ago and is already planning her 2008 wreaths. That's plural, yes, for Bosk will be making one for herself and helping her grandchildren _ Gianna and Chris Vitale, ages 10 and 8 _ make others to give their teachers for Christmas.

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"What beautiful gifts," says Bosk, who lives in Wilmington, Del. "It was a whole new concept, to use fruits and berries and popcorn and to look at nature to find the natural things that you could put in the wreath."

It got the kids thinking, too, she says. "This made them more aware of what can we pull from our own yard, instead of just buying everything."

Bosk hung her wreath on a shepherd's hook in the yard. Birds discovered it immediately and happily ate apricots, popcorn, cranberries and nuts for a couple of months. Squirrels weren't a problem.

And neither was ego. "The kids would decide where they wanted to place this or that," Bosk says. "They had stylistic control."

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© 2008, The Philadelphia Inquirer.