Affordable Holiday Evergreen Planters You Can Make Every Year

Holiday evergreen planters can add a touch of class to any porch or front entrance. Not only are these seasonal planters beautiful and festive, they stay green for months in cold weather. With no rush to take them down after the holidays, they can be a charming addition to your doorstep all winter.

Holiday evergreen planters on each side of a black door, on the front porch of a yellow brick house.

But check the price tag on any fresh planters and you’ll be shocked at how much they can be. Where I live in Toronto, holiday planters usually retail from about $60 and up depending on the size.

However, with a bit of planning, there are ways to make beautiful holiday porch pots for free (or close to it)! Keep reading for my best tips for budget-friendly holiday evergreen planters and how to make them.

Tips for Keeping Costs Low

1. Trim Your Evergreens in the Winter

This may sound like a fairly obvious tip, but it you have an evergreen tree on your property, you can use cuttings from it to make your holiday evergreen planters! Groundbreaking, I know.

If you do have a backyard with evergreens, you might not always think to use them for cuttings. You may go about your summer yardwork, trimming your gardens back without a second thought. But when those spare branches go out with the gardening waste, come winter you might wish you had them back. So do yourself a favor and wait until planter-making season to trim your evergreens. Use them as a resource, trimming only what you need for your holiday planters and saving the rest until next season.

Woman with an electric Dewalt chainsaw cutting a large branch of a cedar tree. — This big cedar branch needed to come down anyway. By waiting until winter, I was able to use it for all my winter greenery.

Keep Off-Cuts From Your Christmas Tree

If you get a real tree each year, you might consider taking a few branches to make some greenery for your planters. Branches often need to be cut from the base of the tree in order to fit it in the stand. I always make sure to keep these off-cuts to use for my holiday planters. Alternatively, if you place your tree in the corner of a room, a few branches from the back might go unnoticed.

Close-up of greenery to be used in holiday evergreen planter.

If you don’t have a real tree to borrow from, consider asking a local Christmas tree seller if they have spare branches to give you. Some retailers actually bundle fresh evergreen branches and sell them if they aren’t willing to give them out for free. And while buying greenery doesn’t feel as good as getting it for free, it usually still works out to a fraction of the cost of pre-made planters.

Buy Store-Bought Planters Once and Save the Accessories

This may be strange advice for a post about making your own planters affordably, but hear me out. The holiday evergreen planters sold in stores usually come in plastic urns that can be reused year after year. Same thing for the accessories. Birch branches, bows, berries and baubles. These things can all be saved for future holiday planters. If you do decide to splash out on store-bought planters this holiday season, you can save everything but the greenery and recreate the look in future years.

Once the season is over, clean off any plastic items and ensure they are dry before storing them indoors. For organic items like cedar branches, dogwood or pine cones, these items decompose over time but they will actually keep for quite a few years if they are kept dry. It is best to store organic items in sheltered outdoor locations—a garden shed for example—as they are a natural home to microorganisms that you may not wish to bring indoors.

Red Berries, Pine cones and Bows

Close-up of decorations to be used in holiday evergreen planters, including birch branches, dogwood twigs, red berries and a large pine cone.

If you are looking to buy some low-cost decorations to make your holiday evergreen planters pop, here are some ideas. Things like large pine cones, artificial berries and large bows made from wire-edged ribbon are timeless and elegant. They can also be reused each year!

Artificial Red Berries

Red berries are perfect for adding a pop of color to your planter while remaining timeless and organic looking. These artificial ones could easily pass for the real thing. Just separate the wire stems and place throughout your planter. You can’t go wrong.

Pine Cones

A large pine cone can also pack a punch in your planter. These 3″ ones are dusted to give the look of snow. Another great thing about these cones is that they come on 6 inch stems, which can be stuck directly into your arrangement or twisted onto a longer craft stick or an evergreen branch for easy placement.

Ribbon Bows

You can’t beat a big Buffalo plaid bow to add a bit of vintage charm to an arrangement. A wire-edged ribbon like this is ideal because it allows you to shape your bow just how you want, keeping it looking crisp. Form your bow and then glue it onto to a long craft stick so you can stick it in the arrangement amongst the greenery. A ribbon bow like this stores well too—the stiffened wired edge allows you to reshape and fluff it up again even if it gets flattened in storage.

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How to Make Holiday Evergreen Planters

Now that we have cost-savings taken care of, let’s dive in to how to actually make these festive beauties!

1. Prep the Planter

Whether you are reusing an urn/ container pot from a previous arrangement or buying new, there are a few things to consider. If you live in a cold climate, you probably won’t be watering your greenery, as any water in the planter would likely freeze. Cold temperatures on their own are pretty good at preserving your cuttings, meaning that your evergreens should stay green for several months with zero maintenance.

Unlike traditional summer planters that use actual plants potted in soil, winter planters use cuttings that are simply arranged in pots. This means that they are usually not very heavy and can blow over in the wind if the contents are not properly weighted. To add some weight to your pots, simply place some stones at the bottom or something else that is heavy (like a yellow brick!).

Yellow brick placed in the bottom of the planter pot to keep it weighted down.

And if you are placing your planters somewhere that experiences rain or snowfall, make sure that your pots have a drainage hole to drain any water that gets in. Greenery sitting in a large volume of stagnant water may break down faster, causing rot and mold.

If you live in a climate that does not experience freezing temperatures in winter, you may choose to build your arrangements using a product Oasis floral foam, a sponge-like material that you can stick the branches into. Floral foam is intended to hold water, preventing the branches from drying out while still promoting drainage. Water once a week to keep the foam moist.

2. Trim and Sort Your Greenery

Depending on where you are getting your cuttings from, you may need to prepare your greenery by trimming it. The size of your boughs will be dependent on your pot size and how bushy you want your planter to be. Personally, I think it looks best if the greenery that sticks out is 1.5 to 2 times the height of the pot. Usually this means working with boughs from 1 to 3 feet in length.

A pile of greenery to arrange into holiday evergreen planters

If you need to trim your branches, make sure you cut from the bottom to avoid the look of any blunt cut ends. Evergreen branches have a nice natural shape that comes to a point. Trimming from the base of the branch (opposed to the tip) allows you to preserve this natural shape.

Divide your branches into two piles; one for larger, more unruly branches, and one for shorter, more delicate branches. The longer, more wild branches will be arranged in the planter first, before the more delicate ones.

3. Arrange the Branches

If you live in a place where winter temperatures often stay above freezing and you want to keep your evergreen branches watered, start by adding in a couple chunks of Oasis floral foam to stick your branches into. I like to skip this step and build my arrangement by sticking branches directly into the pot. I find the cold temperatures preserve the greenery for at least a couple months without watering.

Draw from your pile of large branches, sticking the largest branches in the center towards the back of the pot. When making any arrangement, it is good to know how the pot will be facing so you have a sense of where the front and back of the arrangement will be.

Then, add in the smaller, more delicate branches, fanning them out around the sides and towards the front. Try to make it look as full as you can. It is up to you how precise you want to be with placement. The more time you spend on this step, the neater and more intentional your arrangement will look. I’m fine with a bit of a ‘wild’ look to my planters, which makes the arrangement process pretty quick.

4. Add in Decorations

Now comes the best part: adding in the odds and ends that will really make your arrangement special.

Pine cones, bows and berries - accessories for holiday evergreen planters.

I like to add in sticks of silver birch. These came in a couple arrangements I bought a few years back and I have been reusing them ever since. Odd numbers of these looks best. Three to a pot is ideal.

Red Dogwood branches also look great. I have 5 or 6 sprigs of dogwood for each planter. For a bit of added texture, you can also take regular bare branches and spray paint them red or white!

The pine cones I use also came from a previous planter. They are great because they are fastened to a stem that can go straight into the arrangement. Pine cones like these ones also come with stems, which may make arranging them a bit easier. If you have found other ones you prefer, you can always use a glue gun to glue them onto a craft stick like this. I used these craft sticks to glue my bows onto so that the bows can stick directly into the arrangement.

A holiday evergreen planter with birch branches, red berried and a red plaid bow.

Bows and berries are the last things I like to place in my planters. They are like the crowning jewels, adding color and life to the arrangement. While berries will look good placed anywhere in the planter, I like placing a large bow towards the bottom front, amongst the greenery to anchor the entire arrangement.

Now all that is left to do is to move the planter into place and admire your work!

Final Thoughts

There are few things that can dress up a front entrance like seasonal planters. But with holiday evergreen planters selling at a premium, buying them pre-made might not be an affordable option. Once you try making these yourself, you will know just how simple they are. It is actually pretty hard to make an arrangement that doesn’t look amazing! Reuse your pots and accessories for added cost savings and these holiday planters might just become a new festive tradition!