There’s a Christmas tree in the garden. Well, actually there’s two, if you include the Christmas Tree of Good Intentions that we bought growing in a pot several years ago. That’s lurking around up by the greenhouse, yet to recover from the indignity of being cosseted like and overgrown houseplant for five weeks, before being bunged unceremoniously out into a cold, wet January. It looks like it has the Christmas tree equivalent of mange. Still, we live in hope that one day it’ll leaf up sufficiently to take pride of place for the festive season. Not holding our breath.
Anyway, there’s a new Christmas tree in the garden, and there it will stay, albeit in a transformed state (twiggy bits! Trunky bits! Needles for mulch!). It feels symbolic, which of course it is. December has been so wet – not continually raining, but doing so to Biblical extent when it did – that the ground is largely mush, and my customary Betwixtmas garden furtling shrank largely to practical jobs, like wrestling a section of the guttering from the stubborn grasp of the celastrus, or clearing the downpipe of moss only to discover a root (the celastrus again – the thing’s a stinker) had found its way up there through the drain and was making itself quite at home in the impromptu compost that had gathered at the junction . But Twelfth Night arrived just as the stormy weather departed, and the exit of the tree from the house – complete with accompanying, needle-strewn chaos as a large-skirted, seven foot fir was half carried, half dragged through the living room and out of the kitchen door – seems strangely in keeping with my own feelings of liberation from having been cooped up inside for too many weeks.
Sure, it’s getting cold again. But there’s a hint of blue sky, exciting things are already happening in the flowerbeds, and the days are getting noticeably longer. And I have a Christmas tree to process into useful stuff for the garden.
I LOVE The Christmas Tree of Good Intentions! Apparently you can eat your Christmas tree....
We put our Christmas tree out on Twelfth Night bedecked with bird seed pine cones and apple slices, where the birds feed from giving them shelter...they love it. Come early Spring it gets added to the dead hedge of past Christmas’s along with large prunings from trees and shrubs over the year.