Mistletoe buttonholes

Spent some time with the TEME team working out how to make mistletoe buttonholes, or posies, or whatever you want to call them.

It's not as easy as it sounds - we thought we'd just get some berried mistletoe, and tie a decorative red ribbon on it, American Christmas-style. But we started with the wrong sort of ribbon, and soon found that mistletoe isn't easy to tie anyway. And getting a decent bit with berries on PLUS some good leaves is also a bit challenging. But after a bit of experimentation we hit on the use of male sprigs for the leaves and female for the berries, thus creating an ideal balance - in every sense.

Why are we doing this? To see whether we can create a Tenbury mistletoe 'product' that could be sold online...

(And to provide some TV chefs with mistletoe buttonholes for a Christmas cookery show.. more on that later...)