Happy New Year, everyone! Did you breathe a sigh of relief when the calendar turned to January 2021? Change seems to be the only constant in this life. I’m hopeful for the changes this new year will bring.

This week’s Six pictures were taken in my yard in December. Since the holidays are barely over, I was thinking how berries are often a part of our seasonal decorations. The ones that grace my mantle and other arrangements tend to be artificial. They are constants that will go back into the storage boxes and be just as pretty when I haul them out again, toward the end of this year.

Most of the berries in my yard aren’t suitable for holiday decorating, except the nandinas, shown in the first picture. They have been prolific this year, but I didn’t use them in the house. They shed too easily and make a mess after a few days of drying out in arrangements. Because of these berries in the yard, I have way too many little nandinas all around that must be weeded out frequently.

As I was severely pruning back an asparagus fern last week, I found four colors of berries on the same plant – white, green, red, and a brownish color.

Spikes full of shiny black berries from the monkey grass have been in the borders for months. I would have thought the birds would have taken care of them by now.

This is a “before and after” collage from the beautyberry shrub. Evidently, the birds didn’t want these either. The purple berries were lovely in the fall, but they have dried, shriveled, and turned brown now. Actually, now they are gone, since last week, I cut the whole plant a few inches from the ground.

These crabapples aren’t exactly berries, but they’re close enough for me to include them today. This picture makes them look pretty, but they’re the inedible type of crabapple that just rots on the brances before falling off to make a mess on our front walk. It looks like a gajillion are still hanging on this tree now. I can’t wait for the annual visit of cedar waxwings who swoop in to cover the tree and only take one or two days to strip it bare.

Finally, as you would expect in a holiday-type berry listing, I do have holly shrubs. They are usually just barely turning red at the start of the decorating season. Since they are part of the plantings in our front border beds, we have to keep them pruned back pretty often. As a result, we tend to trim off the outer shoots that would produce most of the berries, but I did find a few in there.

I could have shown some white mistletoe berries, since recent storms have made large branches fall out of the oak trees, but I threw them away before I remembered to take pictures. I don’t use it to hang above the doorways in the house anyway.

I hope you have a good week ahead, and have a blessed New Year.

Shalom, Dottie