After all that white we had this winter, we could use a little green.

The calendar says spring is here, but it still will be a while before the buds on the trees turn into leaves and the garden fills with flowers.

So what to do in the meantime? Bring spring indoors. Open the windows, breathe in the fresh (albeit crisp) air, clip some branches, gather a bouquet of daffodils or a single crocus. Rather than lament spring’s late arrival, this is the time to celebrate what we do have.

“You have to be creative,” said Bar Harbor sculptor Melita Brecher, who manages to make her house look springlike even on the bleakest winter days.

For Brecher, adding flowers and greenery to the house is a way of life – a tradition that she picked up in her native Finland. The climate and landscape there are similar to Maine, but even when the weather is cold, Finns still try to bring a bit of nature indoors, whether in the form of flowering branches or forced paperwhite narcissus bulbs.

“What we do for Easter time is bring in branches,” she said. “In Finland, we bring in birch. Here, we bring in forsythia and I decorate them with colorful feathers. You have these long, skinny sticks and this bundle of colorful feathers.”

Brecher buys colorful feathers at craft stores, then she makes 10 bundles of feathers and affixes them to the branches.

“We have two of those in our house and it’s very pretty,” Brecher said.

While she prefers bright colors, plain feathers would make a subtle, natural-looking substitute. Or, skip the feathers entirely and force just the branches. All you need to do is cut a budding branch and place it in a vase or jar of warm water.

“The branches are easy and they really can be amazingly spectacular,” said Karen Zimmermann, a graphic designer who lives in Otter Creek, a village in the town of Mount Desert.

Zimmermann suggests using magnolia, forsythia, weeping cherry, plum or apple branches – anything with flowers that appear before leaves. But branches with leaves and no flowers can look equally stunning.

“Sometimes I just snag other things like beech and poplar and they just have these gorgeous spring leaves and glossy gray bark,” Zimmermann said.

She also digs up grass that has crept into her garden and places it – dirt and all – in a saucer or shallow container. Spring grass is so tender and bright that it adds a flash of color indoors all by itself. If you prefer to decorate the grass, Zimmermann suggests jelly beans, robin’s eggs, ocean-tumbled pebbles or even Barbie heads. This doesn’t need to be serious business, after all.

For Brecher, planting grass indoors is another tradition that she started in Finland. Rather than dig it up, she starts it from seed.

“It’s to bring early spring into the house,” she said. “Before, you couldn’t even buy tulips or other flowers so that was the closest way to bring color into the house.”

She places four layers of wet paper towels on a flat plate and sprinkles grass seed on top. When it germinates, it takes root in the paper. You can use soil, but you don’t need to. In fact, using the paper towels makes it easier to clean up when the grass starts to fade.

“When you’re done, you pull it off like a wig from the plate,” Brecher said. “Sometimes I put [the paper towel covered with green grass] outside just for fun to inspire the grass to look like this.”

You don’t have to use a paper towel and a plate, however. Pretty much anything will work. Use your imagination – plant a little grass in a pretty teacup, an Altoids tin, a terra cotta pot or a mismatched pottery bowl. It’s so easy to do that it’s no wonder the grass idea has been showing up in magazines and plant books recently.

“Someone else was doing it who wasn’t even Finnish,” Brecher said, laughing. “I thought we were the only ones.”

In addition, Brecher suggests cutting daffodils and displaying them in big groupings indoors for a burst of color. Even though it isn’t very green outside, there are plenty of spring bulbs coming up that provide beautiful cut flowers.

If you don’t have a yard, there are plenty of spring flowers for sale at the local grocery store or florist shop. You don’t need to go overboard – sometimes, a single tulip in a pretty antique bottle can be more beautiful than a huge bouquet. Again, all you need to do is use your imagination.

“Teeny tiny little jars that ink came in or perfume – they look really nice if I put just one little snowdrop in them,” Zimmermann said.

This looks good with other flowers, as well. Even a bunch of dandelions can look regal if you put them in a nice container. If you don’t have old bottles or fancy vases, don’t worry. Use what you have. Stuff a neat-looking coffee can full of daffodils. Add a few blossoms to a bowl full of water and drop in a few floating candles. Take the labels off iced-tea bottles, pasta sauce jars or salsa containers, tie a ribbon around the rim – simple and elegant.

Zimmermann suggests displaying flowers in old canning jars, an antique glass battery case (scrubbed clean, of course), and beverage bottles – Orangina, Arizona iced tea, and those pretty imported water bottles in shades of green and blue work wonderfully. If you only have a few blossoms, try grouping small glass jars on a mirror and placing a single blossom in each.

“The mirror makes those few simple blossoms seem like many,” Zimmermann said.

She also suggests cutting off the top of an olive oil tin with a can opener and filling the tin with red tulips or a single, 6-foot-long branch sweeping across a wall. The leaves will unfurl slowly for a dramatic effect. Pebbles or marbles will keep the stems or branch in place.

If you have a sunny windowsill, try planting herbs such as parsley and oregano in an Italian tomato can with a bright label.

“It’s one of those things [I did] in college and it looks cool,” Zimmermann said.

In “Decorating with Flowers,” Denise Otis suggests placing blossoms in Pyrex science-lab flasks. You can find them at flea markets or antiques stores, and they’re a cool alternative to a vase.

For another scientific alternative, take a test tube (or a cigar tube, which will probably be easier to find), wrap it in fine copper, steel or color-coated wire, and hang it in a window or on a wall as a vase for a single stem.

Jelly jars, barware, and pitchers with funky ’50s-style designs also make interesting containers for a bouquet of tulips or a single crocus.

Whether you prefer a single blossom floating in a glass or a giant swath of forsythia blooming across your wall, you don’t need to break the bank (or spend an hour arranging flowers) to bring spring indoors. All it takes is a sharp pair of pruning shears, a handful of grass seed, a few daffodils and a little creativity to thaw out your winter blues.