How to Decorate the Simon King Wreath Nester part deux - Easter

Welcome to the Wildlife World ultimate wreath decorating guide part deux! This easy-to-follow guide covers everything you need to know to decorate your Simon King Wreath Nester in every season because a wreath isn't just for Christmas. With suitable foliage and appropriate materials, a wreath can work all year round. Look out for new releases of our seasonal blog posts with updates on how to decorate your Wreath Nester in every season. Remember, the Wreath Nester is for birds! If occupied, do not move the wreath nester as the birds will most likely abandon the nest.

However, we thought we'd follow on from everyone's seasonal favourite, the Christmas wreath, with our Easter wreath building guide! We foraged all of the foliage to adorn the Simon King Wreath Nester at the Wildlife World garden in Wiltshire. We love the results and have Fiona, our resident wreath and all things gardening expert, to thank once again. She put her experience and attention to detail into decorating the beautiful Christmas and Easter wreaths pictured.

To accompany this guide, please check out the video below of Fiona building the Easter wreath. The perfect guide on how to decorate your Simon King Wreath Nester, with explanations and helpful tips the whole way through!

How do you make a homemade wreath?

To make the perfect wreath, you've needed to stock up on wreath making supplies in the past. Firstly, you'll need to fashion a wireframe or twigs, vines or pliant sticks to create the structure. Secondly, you'll need wire of various thickness, tape, pins, and twine to attach the decorative materials. On top of all the materials you need to fashion a beautiful and functional wreath, you will also require tools.

Here at Wildlife World, we've taken the tedious and usually quite frustrating part of building the base structure out of the equation. The Simon King Wreath Nester has a natural brushwood form attached to a reinforced steel frame with wire with a nest box in the middle. The design is sturdy and has plenty of gaps in the brushwood and wire to fix all the foliage. All you'll need to make your wreath nester a seasonal stunner is the decorating materials….and a pair of garden secateurs.

What can you use to decorate a wreath?

As mentioned above, wreaths are most often associated with Christmas, but they make lovely year-round decorations. For instance, an Easter Wreath is always a winner! Spring is officially here, so why not make a wreath to celebrate this period of renewed growth. Try attracting garden birds to the Simon King Wreath Nester with some early blooming spring flowers as decoration. Again, we must stress that this is a birds nest box as well as a wreath. Spring is the time of year when your garden birds will be searching for appropriate nest spots.

Snowdrops flower from January to March, and their new white flowers would beautifully accent a spring foliage base. Unfortunately, we were too late to attach them to our Easter wreath as they'd started wilting. Instead, we used Hellebores. It blooms slightly later, so it was still out in full bloom in the garden, plus they come in an array of colours. Their delicate star-shaped flowers make sharp focal points for wreaths made in early Spring.

Once Spring is in full flow, you'll have an abundance of foliage to forage from your or your friends and families garden borders. An Easter-themed wreath can be a riot of colours! With their amazingly bright yellows Daffodils, and bluebells with their signature blue, are both iconic to British gardens. Consequently, they'd make a fine addition to embellish any springtime wreath.

Our wreath builder extraordinaire, Fiona, starts every one of her designs with a solid base layer. That layer's contents can alternate between the usual abundant leafy green foliage to the sculptural stark twisting vines. The Simon King Wreath Nester can accommodate the entire range of these bases as it is, first and foremost, a structurally strong base with a natural brushwood finish. Essentially, what you use to decorate your wreath is whatever you can find in your garden.

Where to find foliage and what to plant?

This is where the fun starts! Foraging in foliage has almost become a sport for our keen-eyed craftsman, product designers, photographers and videographers. We may only be a small team at Wildlife World, but what we lack in size, we make up for in enthusiasm. The reason why we love foraging in our gardens so much is that this is the best and most suitable time to spot wildlife as well. However, we left it to the experts for the wreath nester, in this case, Fiona!

The best places to forage are the ones nearest. It'll give your wreath a natural, local feel. We're blessed here at the office to be surrounded by the beautiful Cotswold countryside. As a result, we have endless hedgerows, colourful gardens, and great big trees that offer an abundance of decorative materials, all of which we've gained permission to take cuttings from. No matter where you live, be it rural or urban, you'll be able to find plants growing in all gardens. If you've not got the plants in your garden that you require, try planting some for future wreaths. Or if you don't have a garden, ask your neighbours and friends if they have any of the decorative material you'd like growing in their gardens.

Fiona found everything she needed to build the spring wreath nester in about half an hour in the Wildlife World Wiltshire garden. She is an expert, though, so don't be disheartened if it takes you longer. It's also slightly more accessible in early Spring as the choice on offer is somewhat less than when the gardens in full bloom in a few months. Plus, she did bring the Teasels from her garden as she knew they'd make a great addition to the wreath!

How to make an Easter springtime wreath

The list below is a mix of what Fiona used for the springtime Easter wreath build layers. Watch the video above for a step-by-step guide on how to decorate the wreath.

Greenery Base Layer:

• Conifer, Holly, Spotted Laurel, any coniferous material

Mid/Thickening Layer:

• Ivy, Viburnum Tinus, Pussy Willow, Twisted Hazel

Accent Foliage:

• Teasels, Winter Sweet Viburnum

Flowers:

• Begonia, Daffodils, Hellebores

After you've collected all your natural supplies, it's time to fix them to the wreath. Fortunately for you, this couldn't be easier. The design of the Simon King Wreath Nester makes it easy to attach a whole array of materials. Fiona mentioned it being a great base structure to affix the foliage too. The steel frame offers stability. The brushwood is not only visually pleasing but has gaps to poke stems through and tie around. The wire used to connect the brushwood covering to the frame is valuable as extra points to attach your chosen decorations.

Top tip

A great design can sometimes come down to balance, or mirroring, of the materials used. The wreath should be well covered the entire way round. One way to achieve this is to use the nester in the middle as a central point. Try to match, to a degree, the choice of foliage on opposite sides of the nester.

The season ahead, Summer

Here are a few plants we'll be looking out for in the garden in Summer to decorate our Summer Wreath. Lonicera or any delicate hedging material, evergreens and conifers, summer perennials such as geraniums, hypericums, daisies or even roses. You could also try using herbs for the summer wreath, such as marjoram, oregano or rosemary. As always, the best foliage to pick is whatever's growing in your garden at that time! You'll be able to see Fiona's Summer Wreath Nester in the next blog of our series in early Summer!

Until then, we'd love to see your efforts at decorating the Simon King Wreath Nester. We've got a year-round competition running to win a £100 voucher at Wildlife World for the best-decorated wreath! With smaller vouchers for the runners up. All you need to do is send us a picture of your wreath to any of our social media platforms with the hashtag #wreathnester.

Good luck, and we look forward to seeing all your beautiful wreaths!