Gardening tips: Creating festive cheer

It’s December! Cue summer, the festive season, holidays and outdoor dining. Whatever your plans, it’s time to roll up your sleeves, slap on some sunscreen and get your garden looking merry and bright.

There’s something magical about lights throughout the garden and with solar options now readily available, why not string a few through trees, along rooflines or railings, around the kids’ cubby house or through pot plants and enjoy the nightly glow.

Pots of colour: Brighten up a corner, create a centrepiece, underplant your trees or fill a spare hanging basket with brightly coloured annuals such as petunias. You’ll find 10 packs of seasonal colour in the garden centre now perfect for such plantings, even red and white flowering packs.

Celebrate a bush Christmas with a living tree. A native lilly pilly, Daintree pine or any potted shrub can be decorated for the festive season then either planted into the garden or potted into a larger vessel for next year.

Lawn care: Treat your lawn to an edge trim and mow, keeping it slightly longer and apply a solution of Seasol or Seamax to encourage healthy root growth to help it through the warmer months.

Nature’s gift: Create a little festive cheer with a homemade wreath using sticks, flowers and foliage from the garden. Spray painted pine cones, bows around pots and mini wreaths of rosemary all add to that yuletide feel.

Give the gift of green. There’s an endless list of amazing houseplants to suit even the most challenged gardener. Mini gardens of succulents or indoor plants, quirky air-plants, big bowls of flowering annuals or a basket of assorted edible plants with a homemade gift tag are practical and pretty.

Celebrate outdoors: Turn the barbecue into your outdoor kitchen with a planter of herbs nearby for a quick and tasty flavour boost to your cooking. Keep the mozzies at bay with citronella candles, rosemary or lavender plants nearby and pop some battery powered candles or lights into lanterns for a relaxing vibe.

A centrepiece always looks beautiful and can be easily achieved by decorating your table with a selection of leaves, branches and twinkling tealights. Don’t forget to add a foliage sprig or flower tied in a bow to the chair backs with a place tag for instant dinner party appeal.

Get cleaning: Give everything a spruce up. Pressure wash pathways, clean out bird baths and fountains, cut back any dead or dying branches and foliage, deadhead any flowers that have finished blooming and treat the garden to a fresh layer of mulch. This seasonal pick-me-up will have you enjoying the great Aussie outdoors this summer.

Fun fact

Why do we kiss under the mistletoe? There are several theories about the origins of this tradition, but the most charming derives from a Viking myth of Frigg, goddess of love and marriage, and her son Balder.

Frigg persuaded all living creatures, elements, metals, sicknesses and plants to take an oath never to harm her beloved son. Envious of his invincibility, the god Loki sought the one thing that had been overlooked – the tiny mistletoe and contrived to have a deadly dart of the plant thrown at him.

Devastated, Frigg declared mistletoe a symbol of peace and love, promising to kiss any who walked under it so that he might be remembered.