The pre-Christmas season is the time for lights, scents and hot treats. Who can resist a delightful evening stroll past festively decorated homes and gardens? It goes without saying that your garden must be one of them. However, unfortunately for many garden owners, creativity extends only to a few fairy lights. Admittedly, fairy lights are essential in a Christmas garden, but that is not all you can do to make your garden especially festive.

Even though there may be hardly a flower in your garden in December, some plants are nevertheless attractive in the winter. Evergreen shrubs and trees provide a welcome splash of green colour among their leafless colleagues. Berries such as snowberries and Callicarpa bodinieri , or beautyberry, also bear attractive fruits in the snow and ice of winter and enhance the beauty of the garden. The elements can also have stunning effects on ornamental grasses such as reeds, bamboo and pampas grass, which look very elegant when coated with hoar frost. However, you will have to wait until the new year for winter bloomers such as witch hazel and Christmas rose. Don’t forget to cut a few hazel and willow branches at the beginning of December so that they will flower at Christmas time. Traditionally they are cut on the 4th of December, St. Barbara’s day.

Apart from the ubiquitous fairy lights and illuminated Christmas figures so popular in the USA, there are so many other ways to decorate your garden for Christmas. Your decorations don’t even have to have their own source of light in order to illuminate the winter evenings. You can use one or more outdoor spotlights to illuminate your decorations effectively. For example, you can put a nativity scene in the garden and place the baby Jesus in it on Christmas eve, as is the custom in many parts of Germany. Father Christmas, a plump artificial snowman, angels, stars and many other figures and motives can be used to create a marvellous Christmas garden. Of course, you can also illuminate any large conifer!