I use pruned branches from my evergreens every holiday season. I love to stick them in all different types of containers outdoors such as watering cans, old wooden buckets and yes, windowboxes. They do look nice when accented with berries, bows, pine cones, or things easily found at the local craft store. I also add lights and sometimes use round glass ornaments. And I also use branches all over the place inside. I put sprigs here and there in baskets, bottles, on the mantle, etc. It is an easy and inexpensive way to really make things look festive.

The bare red branches used in decorating are from the dogwood shrub and are wonderful against the white of the snow. Winterberries (red berries on bare branches) look great too.

"Anyone else doing something like this?"

Of course not: I keep enjoying seasonal flowers in my winter garden.

I think it's hard to get evergreens to look good in containers. I know a lot of people do it and in fact, my favorite "chic" garden center had a container of evergreen in an urn at their front door but I've yet to see one that I think looks good. Somehow there is no "form." To me, it always looked like someone just dumped them in there and didn't spend any time arranging them.

I think greens have to "hang" to look good. I made garland today and have it hanging over my fireplace. It's the first time I ever made it so it was a learning experience. I got the greens for free by going to the recycling center. I found some beautiful blue spruce and also some Scotch pine. I picked up a huge bag of Pt. Orford cypress at the curbside, so I had plenty of material to work with. All of the greens were in beautiful condition and hardly dropped any needles as I worked with them.

The type of garland I made is very, very thick. It reminds me of garland one might see in a photograph from Victorian times. I doubt if one would even be able to purchase garland this thick and lush.

So it looks great on the fireplace and now I'm thinking of making some more to put around some Roman columns I have outdoors and also to run along the fence of the back deck.

Cher

Look at the nurseries for the decorations themes and berries and such.
I am member of perennial club at Lurvey's on Dempster and we had teaching class of doing wreth with all beautifull berries, pinecones, toys etc. everything from this nursery.
Needless to say I learned a lot of decoration technic besides making beautiful wreth.

Buxus sempervirens (English Boxwood) in urns is very hardy and looks good year round, especially when topped with snow :-)

The Busy Lizzys of our garden club stuff 20 windowboxes at the local hotel in our Boro with evergreens. We have found that mugo pine branches that we cut from a local big shrub do the best of all the evergreens. We add a big red bow in Nov. and Dec and change the bow to purple in Jan. and to Green in Feb. for Pat's Day and each of these months we remove some of the bad branches if they are removeable and not frozen in the soil.March we remove the branches and plant in the boxes pansys (yellow bows) and then in May we do the summer plantings.