- Hey, I am so happy you're here again and I can't wait for you to see this episode.

It was shot prior to my time in 2017, but it's so cool about what you can do to repurpose things from your garden to gift wrap.

- My name is Zenaida.

I am a horticulturalist and stylist.

Plants has always been my biggest passion.

I wrote the book Air Plants, the Curious World of Teillandsias.

I've always kind of detested giftwrapping paper that you see in stores with, you know, the synthetic bows and it's all very wasteful to me.

That always kind of bothered me was to see how much was actually thrown away.

I really just kind of wanted to create my own gift.

Wrapping.

The person who receives your package can take your propagated succulent and plant it after Christmas.

Succulents can last for weeks after they've been lopped off.

They can literally sit around on a shelf or a table for weeks, sometimes months, and before being planted.

Same with the air plant, it's living.

And so you can fasten that onto the package with other foliage and things like that or just on its own, but it's living.

And so they can take that tillandsia, which is, you know, to me a much better version of a bow, a living bow and, and grow it.

And it's part of the, part of the gift.

Learning how to wrap an air plant with wire is, is a really good trick to have up your sleeve 'cause you can do so many different things with a tillandsia once you've got it on a piece of wire.

First thing I do is usually I take a 5 to 10 inch strip of wire, either floral wire or 19 / 20 gauge stainless steel wire.

And what I'm after is to basically kind of hook the base of the plant.

I'm trying to, I'm trying to grab onto some of the lower leaves without pulling those lower leaves off.

So I want a secure point in the plant in which the wire's not gonna slip off the top or slip off the bottom.

So I kind of just lasso some of those lower leaves and then you can kind of see where I've got it hooked, where it starts to taper at the base.

The excess wire that you've got on the tillandsia functions very much just like a little twist tie.

All you have to do is twist it and then cut your excess.

I'm gonna give it a few little frames so that isn't not all alone on there.

I just love really dealing with just a plain box.

One of the coolest things about gift wrapping of plants is you almost don't really need any other paper or boxy type of item.

You can use the most basic box brown butcher paper, decorate a brown bag.

So when I first wrapped the box with twine, basically I'm giving a place for the plants to sit and I'm giving myself a little foundation so it gives you options of places to stick the plants.

Got a little grid system on the top of the box in which to start kind of inserting things.

Another thing I like to do that adds a lot more uniqueness and and interest to a package to make things asymmetrical.

Too often we get things in this very precise symmetrical look and, and it can be a lot more interesting to work with a different format.

I usually lay all my materials out to begin with.

It's inspiring to have all your colors and just kind of like a painter would have their paints on a palette.

You can scatter your, your plant materials out.

You wanna focus on plant materials that are going to last a little bit longer.

So evergreens and conifer branches that are typical in reeds and on your Christmas tree and either in the blue or tones or maybe it's kind of yellowy or maybe it's a really deep green or has some reddish tones to it.

And what you don't want is all of your twine just ping every single bit of foliage down.

So often kind of pull some of those through and then when you start to build your package, you can kind of just grab each one and put it next to the other and, and just see what looks good.

Flour, maybe a pine cone that's kind of nice go after these yellowy branches.

I like their kind of brightness.

You can really pick plants and, and things that remind you of that person or the colors that they like or create the package with the feeling that that that person instills in you.

So basically I'm just cutting the succulent off the top of the soil.

You can kind of clean off any soil that you've got there.

I'm removing some of these lower leaves just 'cause I wanna just focus on having that really cute head on it.

Gonna be a cute little living bow on there, but I'm just kind of inserting the tip of the wire right in there into the base of it.

Wrap the wire around the stem, Just kind of tucking that wire in the same way that I tucked those branches and just kind of pulling it through until the head of that succulent where I want it to be.

And then taking that excess wire and just wrapping it around the twine somewhere that it's not gonna be noticed.

So there you've got a decorative package didn't take very long.

Oftentimes there's shrubbery hanging over a fence on a corner.

Things jetting out of a chain link fence where it's just laying on the ground even.

And usually you're kind of doing little cleanup in the process, not advocating for you to go stealing in anyone's anything, but there is so much all around dried flowers, which are already preserved.

You lop 'em right off in the garden where they've already kind of dried on the plant and it's not wasteful.

It's not something that's going straight into the garbage.

You can throw it in your compost.

You really see people's appreciation for it when they get their package.

They almost never have received a gift that looks like that.

They just light up and they think it's so beautiful.

And when you see how happy they are and you see them keep their wrapping materials, it's, it's a precious feeling.

It's, it's really nice.

It's rewarding.