There are plenty of ways of adding the garden and all its bounty into your Christmas celebrations.  The most obvious of course is the tree itself.  Using a fresh cut tree is a great way to add the fragrance of pine to your home, but there are also alternatives such as Daintree pine and Norwegian spruce that can be grown as a living tree in a container for years, bringing them inside for a fortnight each winter.  It’s also nice to fashion Christmas decorations out of garden treasures, such as Spanish Moss for living tinsel, tillandsias, or air plants as mini ‘blooms’ and naturally pine cones and gum nuts sprayed with metallic paint.    Use floristry wire to secure them to your tree.

Another thought is to make your own Christmas wreath. Choose any pliable plant (such as willow, spruce, flowering fruit trees like cherry, plum and peach (all have flexible stems), Chinese elms and even and Australian native pine like this Casuarina.  Flex these into curved shape and tie together to create a circle as the main backbone, and then decorate it with flowers from the garden, nuts, cobs and even ribbons and baubles if you desire.  Choose plenty of robust cones and flowers, clustering them in groups, to ensure you get long lasting impact.  Some plants, like many Australian Natives, dry very well and will be able to even be used the following year, so long as some fresh items are added.  Here, long lasting paper daisies, yellow billy buttons, South African Leucodendrons and Banksias look the part and large gum nuts are a replacement for the ‘traditional’ pine cones and holly.

Come Christmas Eve, nothing is more celebratory than fresh flowers in the house.  If you can’t pick some from the garden, use coloured foliage and you’ll be surprised how great that can look with some ornamental grasses spotted through the bunch.  Potted colour, bought up to few weeks prior can also be successful as temporary indoor flowers.  Poinsettias, which will last for months, are the most common, but also impatiens, wax begonias and hydrangeas last well inside. Of course, with so much entertaining done outside now is stands to reason that jazzing up your BBQ and outdoor seating areas with potted colour, such as red and white petunias, will also add a festive tough that blooms right through till the end of autumn.  Now that’s worth celebrating!

Read more great Christmas garden ideas from Meredith here.

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