Decorate Your Thanksgiving Table with Native Plants
A seasonal arrangement on the Thanksgiving table helps set the mood. I find native foods to use in recipes from our colonial ancestors for the Thanksgiving feast. A walk through my garden also gives me a lot of beauty from native plants for the table centerpiece.
I gather branches from trees that still have their autumn-colored leaves. Dogwoods have beautiful colors in vivid reds and orange. In the forest, I can find our native sassafras trees with bright canary-yellow leaves even after several freezing nights.
Our native witch hazel, Hamamelis virgiana, blooms in the fall with small, fragrant, yellow flowers that resemble twisted straps. It has many other uses, as well. A distillation of witch hazel bark, twigs and leaves mixed with alcohol and water is used mainly as an astringent. The tree’s branches were used as divining rods to locate water and minerals. The witch in witch hazel comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning to bend.
My cranberry viburnum makes beautiful clusters of red berries that are a focal point in my arrangement. I mass them in tight clusters. The showy berries of hawthorn, Crataegus viridis Winter King, are beautiful half-inch-wide berries in bright-red small clusters. Hawthorn berries, leaves and flowers are used by herbalists to help bring down blood pressure. Maybe just looking at the berries is calming to the senses.
The long arching branches of beautyberry, Callicarpa Americana, make beautiful additions to a fall arrangement. The berries are a bright magenta-purple that almost looks artificial. A Japanese variety makes white berries that look like strings of white pearls.