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Recycle your Christmas tree

You'd be amazed how many uses you can find for it around the garden. Once you've packed the decorations away for another year, get to work with a pair of secateurs and a shredder and you can transform your tree into a garden feature. Here are a few ideas:

Mulch: Christmas tree needles and shredded branches make a great mulch around acid-loving plants like rhododendrons, blueberries or camellias. Strip the branches and spread as thickly as you like on the surface of the soil.

Fedges: Drive pairs of short stakes into the ground along your boundary, then cut off the branches and lay them between the stakes, wedging them in tightly to make a fedge – a cross between a fence and a hedge. Add other prunings and woody garden waste through the year to make it nice and dense.

Wildlife habitat: Now all you've got left is the trunk, saw it into equal-length logs and stack in a shady corner to make a woodpile. As it decays back into the landscape it becomes a welcome home for insects, toads, frogs and beetles, who love the cool, damp, shady conditions inside.