Christmas garden makes

Welcome guests to your home this festive season with sustainable decorations and gifts that won't break the bank. Rich Heathcote shows how to use the bounty your garden provides

- Rich Heathcote

Christmas represents a wonderful opportunity to unleash your creative flair. Bringing in fresh foliage from your own garden to create wreaths, decorations and gifts is an easy win on many levels: it's sustainable, eco-friendly, thrifty and, most importantly, it's fun! The projects over the coming pages give you easy-to-follow inspiration that you can adapt based on whatever you have in your garden. As base materials, we've used ivy, skimmia, cedar and even Leylandii, but try any evergreens you have access to. Forage sustainably for decorative flourishes such as berries, dried seedheads and pine cones to add the finishing touches.

I hope you'll feel inspired to get outside and enjoy making beautiful festive creations that are bespoke to your own garden this Christmas.

Berry wreath

'Merry and bright' is the theme for this wreath, with berries, rosehips and flowers adding pops of colour to a textural base of mixed evergreens. The base is a wire frame that is cheap and can be used year after year, with the moss, foliage and decorations all harvested from the garden. As long as the wreath is not exposed to too much direct wind and rain, it will last well for three to four weeks.

You will need

• Garden string
• Wire frame
• Moss (sustainably foraged)
• Secateurs
• Evergreen foliage such as bay, euonymus, hebe, pine and skimmia
• Berries, hips and flowers such as pyracantha, rosehips, skimmia and viburnum

1 Tie string to the wire frame, then wind it all the way around the frame in a zig-zag pattern, leaving the string attached at the end. This is the base that you attach the moss to.