Kevin and Sharon – the reindeer – at the base of the toetoe Christmas tree
December is the month of rituals for us. It is all about countdown and preparation. Will there be new potatoes, fresh peas, strawberries and raspberries ready for Christmas Day? I think we have only ever missed one set of homegrown new potatoes. If my memory serves me right, it was an advanced season and we had eaten all the first crops and hit a lull.
Peas are more problematic and require some precision of timing and management. I adore fresh peas though I lose interest when they are podded and boiled. Browsing from the plant is my preference, followed by raw in salads. Peas generally do better in cooler climates. I admit the ones in the photograph are English. Ours never crop that heavily. In fact they take up quite a bit of space for a meagre to moderate crop here. There are more productive options where space is limited, not the least being beans. But nothing can replace the taste delight of fresh peas. We never have a Christmas turkey here, but we do peas if we can.
Some years, the raspberrries will ripen in time for Christmas Day. The week or two after Christmas they come on stream at an alarming rate, needing to be picked every day but whether those early ones make the deadline for dessert is entirely beyond our control. Even with our raspberry cage, it is an ongoing battle between humans and birds, mostly blackbirds. The pie seems a fairly good option for the birds, in my opinion. They will scout out the slightest weakness in the cage, squeezing through tiny gaps in their determination to help themselves. The wretches will also breach the cloche defences to take out the strawberries we guard for Christmas breakfast. It is a war out there as Christmas approaches.
Christmas trees, we’ve had a few. The DIY ethos rules unchallenged. We have never bought a tree and never had a tinsel one. Generally we have wildling pines harvested from the property. If we are lucky, Mark has preselected the wildling pine and actually given it a couple of trims to get the growth denser than usual. More often, he resorts to wiring in additional branches in a vain attempt to create something akin to the commercially trimmed pines, or the Northern European abies with their wonderful conical shapes. The thought is there even if the reality is a little different.
By far our most creative tree was the one our second daughter made out of toetoe a few years ago. Home from London, she was inspired by an illustration she had seen of one created from the plumes of pampas grass. No pampas here. It is on the absolutely banned list as a noxious weed. But toe toe (which used to be a cortaderia but has now been reclassified as an austroderia) is our native substitute.
Should you wish to try this at home, be warned. It takes many more toe toe plumes than you think. Many, many more. They will moult through your car boot, even more in the construction area and they will then gently shed in the house all Christmas. But then so do pine needles and they are a more difficult to vacuum up. The toe toe tree was a tour de force. It had a certain Pacifica vibe going, combined with European style. If you want to try it yourself, there are step by step instructions on my website. https://jury.co.nz/2010/12/24/construct-your-own-christmas-tree-with-abbie-camilla-jury/
All this is entirely academic for us this year. After more than three decades of building our own family traditions and keeping them the same as assorted offspring migrated home for Christmas, this is the first time we will not be celebrating at home. We are heading over to join the Australian-domiciled daughters and their families this year. I guess it may even be prawns on the barbie. It will be different as the next generation build their traditions for the festive and family season.
First published in The New Zealand Gardener and reprinted here with their permission.
1) I have not made a great study of artificial Christmas trees but from what I can see, there is a vast range and both quality and price are equally variable. They are not as easy to customise as a living tree (or a dying tree, to be precise, if you have one without roots). There is a certain danger of ending up with one that looks similar to a shopping centre tree, especially if you opt for decorations that are restrained and unified as is favoured by many designers. For many, much of the charm of the traditional tree lies in the mishmash of family decorations passed down the decades.
3) If you have a suitable tree outdoors, decorating it with expendable decorations can be a festive greeting to be shared with passers-by. These are thujas. Norfolk Island pines look magnificent with a star on the top if you can work out how to reach their elevated heights. I have seen it done, though I am not sure how one would manage without a cherry picker or a tree-climbing monkey in the family. But folk are sufficiently enterprising to festoon their houses in Christmas lights (and pay the power bill) so no doubt there are some quite capable of decorating trees outside.
4) Our cute little Picea albertiana conica died. I have wondered about shaking all the dead foliage out of it and recycling it for the next few years as a skeleton Christmas tree. It is the perfect size and shape and could be stored in a shed. However, I recall one year using a large yet shapely dead branch which I spray-painted white. The children were young at the time but they were distinctly underwhelmed by their mother’s creativity and just wanted a proper Christmas tree such as other families had.
5) If you want a living tree, you need to set your sights small and choose a dwarf if you are intending to keep it alive for several years. Conifers have relatively large root systems and will not thrive on benign neglect when kept in a pot long term. However the very small growing varieties can be kept for many years with just the usual care that container plants require. They get more characterful with age, though not necessarily a whole lot larger.
6) At the risk of repeating myself from previous years, I offer up our two variations. Both use a handy, permanent, metal frame I was given. 
Garden lore: A Flower Fairy Christmas
This is what our corner of Otaraoa and Tikorangi Roads used to look like in the mid 1990s. The havoc on the left hand side is the result of major work Mark carried out to reduce flooding through our park and to return some of the stream to its original bed. His tidy grandfather had straightened up the stream to run along the boundary back around the early 1900s.
A year or two later and our children are getting off the school bus on what was a quiet country road. Note the trees on the right hand side.
This is what our side of the road looks like now. The trees have grown up and many people tell us how much they enjoy the flowering.
But we now have the petrochemical industry all round us and down this formerly quiet little country lane is the huge Mangahewa C site with its eight gas wells, single men’s camp and much additional activity. The road has been strengthened and widened for their heavy transport, all done in such a way as it is now impossible to walk along the verge. It is sometimes referred to as “loss of rural amenity”. Children can no longer walk safely to and from school bus stops, cycling is not safe, forget horse riding. It is pretty difficult to find a safe position to stand clear when the heavy transport thunders by. Meantime, across the intersection, the other side of Tikorangi Road – largely unused by the petrochemical industry – has remained unchanged over the past 20 years. It is a stark contrast.
And on the right hand side of the road where there used to be trees, there is now a green wasteland dominated by the designated high tension power lines that Todd Energy, a petrochemical company, deemed necessary for their operations. Sadly, petrochemical development is now given precedence over rural amenity, local residents or the preservation of the environment. This is our world of 2014. During the day we listen to the heavy transport. At night, our formerly pitch black sky is often lit by gas flares in one or more quadrants. On an otherwise quiet Sunday morning today, I could hear the distant noise from Mangahewa E site. Every night we go to sleep to a low drone from one of the plants and we are not even sure which one it is any longer because there are four possible sources for the noise. But under the Resource Management Act, we are told by our councils that “effects are less than minor” and we are not, therefore, an affected party.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 