Natural Christmas Decorations from Your Garden

Instead of buying expensive decorations, source your Christmas decor from nature this year. Natural decorations are cheap (or free!), eco-friendly and you can grow most of them in your own garden.

Before the days of late-night shopping, department stores and Amazon Prime, people decorated their homes at Christmas using greenery, berries, dried fruit and nuts. Natural Christmas decor is having a modern-day revival, with rustic decoration, nostalgia and whimsy being at the forefront of Christmas 2025 trends. Bring the outside inside this Christmas and enjoy a sustainable homemade Christmas.

Depending on where you live, you may be able to forage locally, but to guarantee a ready supply of natural decor for your Christmas tree, table and home, look to your garden. From traditional classics like holly and ivy to overlooked gems, such as hydrangea heads and rosemary, you may be surprised at what you can find just a few metres from your front door. Your garden is a gift that can keep giving even in the middle of winter – here’s my guide to making the most of it.

Foraging for Christmas decorations

What you do with your garden is up to you, but if you’re foraging further afield, be mindful of who owns the land and be respectful of the environment. Follow responsible foraging guidelines and remember to leave plenty of berries for the birds!

Things to look out for in your garden and the wild include:

Conifer branches – e.g., pine, fir, spruce, juniper
Pine cones (autumn is the best time to collect these, so make a note in your diary for next year!)
Berries – e.g., holly, rowan, viburnum, rosehips
Evergreen plants – e.g., holly, ivy, eucalyptus, mistletoe, sea buckthorn
Twigs or larger branches (don’t cut live branches from trees unless they’re in your garden)
Herbs – e.g., rosemary, bay, sage
Dried seed heads (you may need to collect these earlier in the year) – e.g., teasels, hydrangeas, sea holly, fennel, angelica
Ornamental grasses and flowers (cut and dried earlier in the year)

Natural Christmas tree decorations

Christmas tree decorations can be as simple or complex as you want to make them. The key to having a cohesive style is limiting the colours and types of decorations, but having plenty of them. Instead of making a hundred different decorations, use twenty each of five different styles. Foliage itself can count as a decoration, particularly if you choose a contrasting colour or texture.

The only limit to what you can create is your imagination, but if you’re struggling to find inspiration, here are some ideas for natural decor for your Christmas tree:

Keep it simple for a small Christmas tree with pine cones, orange slices, chillis and cranberry garlands. Your tree will smell good enough to eat.
Cut slices of wood from a fallen bough, drill a hole and thread through some ribbon. Paint them, spray them gold, try your hand at wood burning or decoupage or simply add a fancy ribbon bow.
Instead of tinsel, wind lengths of eucalyptus, laurel or a variegated ivy like Hedera 'Gold-Edged' around your tree. The contrasting foliage helps break up the mass of coniferous branches.
Add a pop of fresh colour with sprigs of winter heather in purple, pink or white.
Skimmia has beautiful panicles of buds at this time of year, which would also add subtle colour, though be sure to leave plenty on the plant to blossom in spring. Choose Skimmia ‘Rubella’ for red buds or Skimmia ‘White Globe’ for a soft, lime green colour.
Poke hydrangea heads into the branches as a sustainable alternative to baubles. If you want to retain some of the hydrangea’s colour, you’ll need to harvest and dry these earlier in the year. Red and blue varieties look particularly striking.
Dried flowers such as gypsophila (baby’s breath), peonies or bunches of roses, lavender, statice, or Helichrysum bracteatum (strawflower) add splashes of colour and texture.
For a softer look, use dried grasses and seed heads that have turned golden and brown. Many of these will still be on the plants in December – perfect for the less organised among us!

If you want to use natural materials but embrace a glitzy look, then spray pine cones, dried teasel, sea holly, allium and poppy seedheads gold or silver.

What to grow in your garden: Eucalyptus 'Azura', Scots pine, cherry laurel, Erica 'Winter Ladies' Heather Mix, ivy, Hydrangea 'Teller Red', skimmia, Rosa 'Red Wanderer', peonies, gypsophila, Helichrysum 'Red Jewel'

Alternative Christmas trees

A young buy points to a sliced orange decoration, hung on an alternative Christmas tree made from horizontal branches tied together with twine. Other decorations include pine cones, cinnamon sticks and gingerbread stars.

I’m a big fan of a real Christmas tree, but if a real tree isn’t practical due to space constraints, allergies or other reasons, you can create a beautiful minimalist Christmas tree using just a fallen branch or a bunch of sticks and some twine.

The first Christmas in my London flat, I found a couple of silver birch branches, propped them up in a vase and decorated them with fairy lights and homemade decorations to make an understated, yet festive, alternative Christmas tree. Years later, we created a stick tree using branches and twine for our kids to decorate. Because I’m lazy, we leave it up year round and change the decorations according to the season. They love switching the lights on, and it’s nice to have a place to hang the many crafts that get brought home from school or nursery.

Fallen branches are easy to forage. You can use branches from any tree, but I do think silver birch is beautiful if you can find it. In one of nature’s handy coincidences, December is your last chance to prune silver birch before the sap rises.

What to grow in your garden: silver birch, beech, hazel, dogwood

Christmas wreath ideas

Festive wreath hanging on a wooden door. The wreath is made from evergreen foliage, including eucalyptus, dried flowers and dried seedheads.

Wreaths are perhaps the most obvious natural Christmas decorations you can source from your garden. Rather than having a style of wreath in mind and a preconceived idea of what you want to forage, take a walk in your garden or local area and see what materials present themselves.

Look for shrubs, trees and climbing plants with different shades and textures of evergreen foliage, plus berries, cones or seedheads. Most conifer branches don’t grow back if you cut into old wood, so trim with care! Ivy is a great material for wreaths and other Christmas decorations as you can cut it back hard without damaging the plant.

Here’s my four-step guide to creating a wreath using materials from your garden.

Start with a base. You could make your own using grapevines or willow or buy a wire or moss effect wreath to speed things up.
Trim your foliage to an appropriate length and create small bundles containing branches and leaves with different textures – a bit like a miniature bouquet of flowers.
Tie these foliage bundles onto the wreath using flexible wire or twine. Work in one direction and make sure each bundle you add overlaps the previous one. Continue until you have a complete wreath.
Add any additional decorations, such as pine cones, sprigs of berries or dried flowers. Arrange these loosely on top of the foliage to get an idea of how you want the finished wreath to look before securing them.

For a traditional wreath, use conifer branches, holly, ivy and pine cones. This is the ideal way to use any branches you trimmed off your Christmas tree. Noble fir is a classic choice, though you can use any conifer you have to hand.

If you prefer a lighter, more modern style, opt for eucalyptus, Pittosporum 'Garnettii' and blue spruce, with sprigs of white flowers or berries (Symphoricarpos is very popular, though you may be lucky and find some mistletoe).

Alternatively, keep things simple with a minimalist dogwood wreath. A red-stemmed variety is attractive on its own, but you could add berries, dried flowers or other decorations for more interest.

If you’re running out of time and making your own wreath is just one too many items on your to-do list, buy one of our beautiful natural Christmas wreaths.

What to grow in your garden: holly (e.g. Ilex 'Blue Princess', Ilex ‘Golden King’), classic or variegated ivy, eucalyptus, Symphoricarpos (snowberry), Sarcococca 'Dragon Gate', Cornus 'Sibirica'

Christmas garlands from your garden

A garland of conifer branches and pine cones draped over a pale wood mantlepiece in front of Scandi-style white and gold Christmas decorations.

If you have a wealth of evergreen foliage available, you can use it to create a garland to decorate your mantlepiece, porch or doorframe. Conifers and holly last longer than other leaves, so if you have more unusual foliage, this may be a project to carry out close to Christmas. For added interest, weave in plants with colourful foliage, such as euonymus and leucothoe.

What to grow in your garden: conifers (e.g. chamaecyparis, thuja, leylandii), Griselinia littoralis, holly, ivy, Euonymus 'Ovatus Aureus', eucalyptus, laurel, Viburnum tinus, Leucothoe 'Zeblid'

Natural Christmas table decoration ideas

Layers of pine branches, pine cones and white pillar candles form a festive table runner.

Unlike wreaths, garlands and Christmas tree decorations, your Christmas table decorations only need to look good for a few hours. Using natural materials from your garden is a budget-friendly way to decorate your table, and it makes for easy cleanup afterwards, as you can add most plants to your compost bin.

Here are some simple ideas to make your Christmas table look festive:

Create a table runner with layers of pine or bay branches interspersed with cream or red candles.
For slimmer tables, ivy makes a good table runner, particularly if you use decorative varieties, such as Hedera 'Sulphur Heart' and Hedera 'Marbled White'. Pittosporum or eucalyptus are other options.
Add sprigs of greenery (rosemary, pine or holly work well) and red berries to slim vases, water glasses or jars filled with water. Add a floating candle to the top of each vase and cluster three vases or glasses of different heights together to create a centrepiece.
Arrange decorative twigs or pine cones in clear vases and add fairy lights for a twinkling, minimalist display. Alternatively, you could tie twigs around the outside of a jam jar and place a dried hydrangea head or other decorative seedhead in the jar.
Take your Christmas wreath down for a few hours and place it in the middle of a circular table with a tall pillar candle or arrangement of candles in the middle.
Use sprigs of herbs or scented shrubs like sarcococca (Christmas box) to create simple decorations for napkins or wine glasses.

What to grow in your garden: Juniperus 'Green Carpet', bay tree, ivy, Pittosporum 'Pompom', silver birch, Acer 'Sango-Kaku', holly, Sarcococca confusa

Other Christmas decor from nature

Three vases filled with dried flowers, grasses and seedheads with a white and silver theme.

If you prefer non-traditional Christmas decorations, focus on dried flowers and grasses, seed heads, and shrubs and trees with decorative stems. I passed a huge pampas grass in the overgrown garden of an abandoned house the other day and was rather tempted to take a few of the tall plumes. I resisted, but if you have access to one, a handful of these stems would look fantastic in a tall vase or umbrella stand.

Smaller ornamental grasses look great displayed with dried flowers or seedheads to give contrasting texture. Display them in vases or create a dried wreath to decorate your home long after you've taken the Christmas lights down. Large alliums, hydrangeas, fennel, teasel, sea hollies, honesty, nigella and poppies all produce fantastic seedheads in varying shapes, sizes and textures.

Dogwood and some varieties of salix have gorgeous straight fiery-coloured stems at this time of year, which are perfect for making smaller twig decorations, such as stars. Cultivars of corkscrew hazel and willow have wonderfully twisted branches that look fantastic displayed in a vase.

What to grow in your garden: Cortaderia selloana 'Alba', Miscanthus 'Adagio', fennel, Allium ‘Globemaster’, Angelica gigas, dogwood (e.g. Cornus ‘Sibirica’), Eryngium 'Magical White Lagoon'

Edible Christmas decorations

A fruit cake with white icing dripping down the side, topped with sprigs of rosemary and cranberries.

Even if you’re not planning on eating the decorations, it’s best to use edible plants to decorate your Christmas cake, yule log and other festive treats. Herbs are perfect, and rosemary, bay and sage give you plenty of options for contrasting textures. Add some berries or hips for colour, and you have a stylish cake that took you all of five minutes to decorate.

Cranberry sauce is a Christmas dinner staple, and you can pair raw cranberries with orange slices to create colourful garlands or tree decorations. If you have a spare garden bed or large container, plant a cranberry bush – Cranberry ‘Pilgrim’ is a popular variety – and harvest your own berries from September up until the first frosts. Fresh cranberries aren’t particularly popular with the birds, so using these instead of holly berries is better for our feathered friends.

All rosehips are edible when cooked, but hips from dog rose (Rosa canina) is generally considered to have the best flavour. That said, if you’re using the hips for decorative purposes, it doesn’t really matter which variety you use, though species roses (and hybrids and cultivars of these) tend to produce the most hips.

Sea buckthorn, rowan and certain varieties of viburnum also have berries that are edible when cooked. There are also plenty of plants with bright toxic berries at this time of year, so make sure you’re completely sure about what you’re picking. Pine and spruce needles are also edible and make a refreshing tea, though this is best made from fresh needles collected in spring.

What to grow in your garden: rosemary, cranberry, bay, purple sage, Rosa canina, Rosa rugosa 'Alba', rowan

Natural Christmas gift wrap

A gift wrapped in hessian, with a sprig of fir, pine cone and dried orange slice as decoration, help in place with twine.

Ditch the wrapping paper this year and dress up brown paper or hessian wrapped gifts with some carefully selected foliage or berries from your garden. To prevent the recipient accidentally pricking themselves, choose a spineless variety of holly, or use rosemary, eucalyptus or fir. Pair with a sprig of dried flowers, a pine cone or dried orange slices for a simple, elegant decoration.

What to grow in your garden: Ilex 'Lawsoniana', Ilex 'J.C. van Tol', rosemary, Eucalyptus gunnii, orange tree

Alison Ingleby

Horticultural Editor at Gardeners Dream.

Alison has more than a decade's experience in growing fruit, vegetables and flowers, from pots on a balcony to home gardens and allotments. She is currently redesigning her own space to create a playful garden that's child-friendly and bursting with colour. In her spare time, she helps maintain a community garden for families who've experienced baby loss.

Alison is passionate about sharing gardening knowledge and tips and will extol the benefits of gardening to anyone willing to listen!

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