The idea of cutting down a Christmas tree can conflict with ideals about living a green, uncluttered life. Melissa Anderson wanted a natural tree for her home but is uncomfortable with the idea of cutting down a perfectly good evergreen only to dispose of it after the holiday season. She also recently downsized her living space and didn’t want to overcrowd it with holiday decor. The Edina resident decided that she could make her own Christmas tree if only she had enough nice branches to cluster together.
Ask and you shall receive. While on a walk around Lake Harriet, Anderson discovered piles of buckthorn branches that had been cut down and left near the walking path. Buckthorn is an invasive species of shrub that has woody brown bark with silvery, cork-like projections. Left unchecked, buckthorn crowds out other native plant species, eliminating the diversity necessary for ecological health and sustainability, so cutting it down is a good idea. But Anderson sees no reason why the cut branches can’t be put to good use. She collected some of the found branches thinking that they might make an ideal, environmentally thoughtful Christmas tree.
“I used a nice heavy flower pot with straight sides,” says Anderson. “I lined the pot with plastic bags. Then I bound the branches together like a bouquet, wrapped them at the bottom with packing tape and arranged them inside the pot. Afterward, I filled the pot around the base of the branches with traction grit”—a kind of gravelly sand you can buy at hardware store. “This made the pot sturdy enough to hold the tree upright.” The completed tree stood 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide. Anderson adds, “Anyone could create a similar tree in virtually any size and shape by bundling together more or fewer branches. It’s a great way to get a Christmas tree into a small room.”
Anderson covered the top of the pot with plastic, tissue paper and glass stones. “The colored tissue paper and glass stones made the base look pretty,” she says. To decorate her buckthorn Christmas tree branches, Anderson made tissue-paper flowers and hung them in and around the limbs. She added colored twinkle lights. “This tree made a natural, light and graceful presence in our home,” Anderson says. “The airy silhouette of the buckthorn makes a wonderful counterbalance to what can be a heaviness of the season. And the whole thing cost easily under 10 bucks and doesn’t require watering.”
For added interest, Anderson kept a stack of colored paper and pens on a table near the tree. “Whenever we had guests over, we asked them to write words, any words they wanted onto the scraps of paper,” she says. “Then we hung those words on the tree.” Friends wrote words like “delight,” “play,” “compassion,” “courage” and “happiness.” “My favorite word,” says Anderson, “came from an 82-year-old friend of mine. Her word was, ‘ferocious.’ ”
Because Anderson chose more subdued colors for the tissue flowers, she left the tree up well into January without feeling like it was too Christmas-y. Meanwhile, the twinkle lights added brightness to the room during the dark months of winter.
Anderson is looking forward to making a new tree this holiday season. “I could have saved it,” says Anderson. “But there is so much buckthorn out there in people’s yards, it shouldn’t be difficult to re-create a similar tree this year.” Anderson encourages others to search out discarded buckthorn branches and make their own version of a buckthorn Christmas tree.
