‘Tis the season to be jolly and Clemson Extension Senior Associate Horticulture Agent Barbara Smith has some decorating tips to help get people in the holiday spirit.
Smith says decorating with flowers and fresh greenery can help make the season bright. Some suggestions include poinsettias, florist cyclamen, kalanchoes, amaryllis, forced paperwhites and phalaenopsis orchids.
“I prefer to use flowering plants that are a little more uncommon for the holidays,” Smith said. “My favorites are cyclamens, amaryllis, paperwhites and phalaenopsis orchids.”
Smith and her family have a longstanding tradition of using live plants for holiday decorating.
“I have a wide variety of plants in my garden that provide greenery, berries, seed pods and more,” she said. “I’ve learned to use live greenery in creative ways.”
As a senior consumer horticulture agent, Smith has contributed to writing and revising fact sheets to help people decorate with live plants. These resources are available through the Clemson Extension Home and Garden Information Center (HGIC).
One popular fact sheet is Holiday Decorating with Fresh Greenery (HGIC 1753), which explains how to gather, use and maintain greenery for holiday decorations.
Smith also recommends creating garden gnomes to add holiday cheer, following the Holiday Garden Gnome fact sheet. This project involves using items including a tomato cage, zip ties or floral stem wire, greenery, a stocking hat and mittens, a fake nose, and yarn or Spanish moss for a beard.
“This is an activity that can include family members of all ages and become a tradition,” she said.
Other holiday decorating fact sheets cover projects such as making a Colonial-inspired Apple Candle Holder, How to Make a Boxwood Kissing Ball for the Holidays, Holiday Decorating with Orange Pomanders and Creative Ideas for Holiday Decorating.
Start a new holiday tradition with your family this year by making orange pomander balls.
Barbara H. Smith, ©2021 HGIC, Clemson University
Smith’s horticulture journey
Smith’s journey as a Clemson Extension senior associate horticulture agent began during her childhood.
“From the time I could walk, my parents instilled a love of plants in me,” she said. “They had a beautiful landscape with traditional Southern plants like azaleas, camellias, sasanquas, dogwoods and boxwood. I grew up helping them in the yard.”
After high school, Smith enrolled as a pre-med major at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. However, her interest shifted to botany after two pack trips to Montana and Wyoming, where she used botanical keys to identify wildflowers. She changed her major to biology with a minor in chemistry.
“Erskine didn’t offer a degree in botany,” she said. “I took botany classes and had two amazing professors.”
A few weeks after graduation, she married her husband and began a master’s degree in horticulture at Clemson University. As the only female horticulture graduate student, she recalled a favorite memory involving the use of a sling blade to clear weeds for a professor.
“He asked if I had ever used a sling blade,” Smith said. “I told him I grew up using one. He pointed to his grape vines and told me to clean out all the weeds under the trellises. He left and came back in a few hours. When he returned, I had finished the work and was sitting under a tree in the shade. He looked at me and said, ‘You’ll do.’”
During graduate school, she developed a nature trail project at the Clemson Botanical Garden, now known as the South Carolina Botanical Garden. Also as a graduate student, she also worked with two other students, Bob Head and John Griffin, to relocate endangered plants from areas set to be flooded by Lake Jocassee.
Smith’s career has included teaching horticulture at Walhalla High School in Oconee County and Lakeside Middle School in Anderson County, starting a landscape design business and consulting for nurseries. In February 2015, she became a horticulture agent with HGIC.
“In nearly 10 years, I’ve learned so much and continue to be challenged,” she said. “This is the best horticulture job I’ve had.”
Smith and other HGIC agents provide South Carolina residents with advice on topics such as landscaping, gardening, plant health, food safety and nutrition. For assistance, residents can call 1-888-656-9988 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
While Clemson HGIC information is tailored for South Carolina, it has gained a global audience.
“We get calls from all over the United States and emails from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia,” Smith said.
One memorable caller from Fairbanks, Alaska, laughed upon learning he had reached Clemson, South Carolina. Smith provided him with the University of Alaska Extension Service contact to answer his question about cabbage.
In addition to her other duties, Smith writes blog posts, shoots photographs for publications and contributes to HGIC’s weekly photo blog.
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