Around this time in 2014, my friend Emma (on Instagram as @takeapicturelady) invited her friends and followers to participate in a botanical advent. She had started one, somewhat spontaneously, the year before and, as is often the way with Instagram and other social media, it’s more fun when people join in.

The idea of the botanical advent is to work with flowers and plants (or other natural / botanical materials) to make an arrangement each day of the advent. For example, many people arrange petals and leaves in the shape of a number (the day of the advent). I personally was challenged enough by the idea of coming up with an arrangement each day, that I didn’t need the added challenge of making a number. Instead I enjoyed playing with colour (as I do!), texture and pattern to come up with a botanical arrangement to mark the advent each day. Beside being a beautiful, simple creative activity, it is a fantastic alternative advent for children and families who want to have a holiday a

dvent that is zero waste and plastic free, no to mention sugar free and healthy!

I soon realized making an arrangement each day was even more of a challenge than I expected, with very little daylight in December (and me away from home for all but about 20 minutes of daylight) it was hard to get an arrangement done and photographed in so little time — each day. Then there’s the fact that we don’t buy cut flowers or pick plants; we only collect. We soon realized we had not sufficiently collected enough natural materials over the fall to have a lot of variety to work with in making the arrangements. And then there are those days, when you don’t have creative inspiration. Some days I pushed myself through and made something anyway, and other days I asked Ro or Sen to make an arrangement for me. (Of course, I gave them full credit!)

It turned out to be an excellent idea to ask Ro and Sen to contribute to the botanical advent making. Ro loved having a fun early morning project to wake up to, and Sen was very proud to do as his big sister and make “beautiful flower rainbows like Rowee.” He loved, too, that he was trusted to handle the delicate dried flowers. I was particularly delighted to see how gently he handled the fragile dried flowers and the fine motor skills he used to arrange tiny dried berries, the patience required to move a berry back to its place 4, 5, 6 times when it rolled away. After the advent was done they both continued to ask to play with the flowers over the course of the winter. (Previously we had mostly done this outside in the summer making nature mandalas and natural story boards.)

So this year, having learned from last, I’m involving the children from day 1, we’ve gathered more natural treasures (pinecones, flower petals, dried leaves and so on) and are ready to start our botanical advent on Tuesday, December 1st. Please join us! And, feel free participate even if you can’t do an arrangement every day.

Visit the posts that were tagged #botanicaladvent to get an idea of the arrangements people shared last year.

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More Zero Waste Crafts, Projects and Inspiration:

DIY: Make all natural temporary tattoos from flowers

DIY: Citrus herbal play dough

DIY: Floral egg-shaped bath bombs 

DIY: Mother Nature costume made of leaves

Inspiration: Ecominimalism and an Interview with Robin Kay

Minimalism and Zero Waste: 7 Books to Inspire and Inform

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