That's odd, that tree doesn't look green ...

For several years now, I've used a pruning from an ash tree in my garden as my Christmas tree - the travel costs are about ten yards, which has been great! I painted it gold, and each year I topped up the colour, then set it up again - I have a flower bucket from I-don't-know-where, and I anchored my eight foot tall "offcut" into it by wedging it in clean cat litter. A little unusual, but it worked for me, I hid the cat litter with pine cones, old tree decorations and the odd bit of tinsel.

However, now that I've downsized my house, I don't really have enough square footage spare in my living room to put it up and still have room to move around easily and get hold of everything I want ... or maybe I just get more claustrophobic these days!

And then a friend of mine gave me the link to the perfect solution, on the Eden Project blog no less:

http://www.edenproject.com/blog/index.php/page/2/

This is what the home-made wall-hung Christmas tree looks like on there. I think its brilliant!



I won't have time to do it this year, but I'll set it up for next - I have lots of loooong branches that could be great in this formation - sturdy ones would be buddleia stems, they'd be long enough for the outsides, and inside there could be more buddleia, or anything else really - the blackcurrant stems are pretty long, and the raspberry canes grow *huge* round here. All in all, I think its going to be lovely :)

I'd like to confess, right here right now, that my decorations aren't green. I've done the classic thing - started off with half a dozen plain little baubles from my childhood, and added a few more exotic things every year. This stuff has built up over a long time, and I've collected them from America and Germany and points in between ...

This was my Christmas tree a few years ago.

A closer view ....

And this is one of my favourite decorations!