Christmas Flower Time in Australia

Christmas time in the Southern Hemisphere is so very different to the Northern Hemisphere. There are no snow flakes to fall gently on the conifers' boughs because it is our summer time. Holly berries are a long way off from turning the bright, cheerful colour depicted on all the Christmas cards we persist in sending to our neighbours and friends. Snowmen [why not snowladies?] do not enhance our front lawns or if they do they are made of white foam stuff.

Father Christmas does wear the thick red suit and snow boots that he donned onto his plump body in his bedroom at the North Pole. Reindeers do prance across the roofs of the gaily lit houses in the suburbs and Santa Claus still comes down the chimneys of the few homes that still have open fireplaces. As most homes in Australia now have other means of warming their houses, he probably has to creep through a side door so he won't be seen. And he still enjoys a "tinny" [can of beer] and a biscuit or an orange to help assuage his hunger. No wonder the old man with a white beard should join a weight reduction group!

Folk do attend church on Christmas eve, perhaps the only time they enter the holy place since the last Christmas.

But when it comes to decorating our house with flowers, those who live with our feet in the air are very lucky. The Rowan trees' berries have begun to colour and, failing these being available, we can always use Jaffa lollies. This idea has become traditional on my Christmas table. I pick holly leaves and carefully arrange the bright red balls [filled with chocolate] with the green holly twigs in the centre of the large white damask table cloth. The 'berries' have vanished by the end of the feast and the real berries are left on the trees to feed the birds at Winter time.

To fill our vases, we have many choices. Late flowering roses, for instance the David Austen Old English hybrids, are in bloom, ["Chianti", "Dark Lady", "Gertrude Jekyll", "L.D.Braithwaite", "Prospero", "Sir Edward Elgar" and "The Prince" to name a few of the red Old English roses] and there are the Asiatic lilies which will perfume the whole room. Day lilies are another choice and to give the house another scent, I pick some Philadelphus to place in a vase in the kitchen, its sweet perfume mixes with the turkey baking in the oven and the plum pudding simmering on the stove. I grow Philadelphus coronarius [the original Mock Orange], Philadelphus 'Virginal' [very frost hardy, large and wonderfully fragrant flowers] and Philadelphus 'Belle Etoile' with its red blotch in the middle of the white flower, I think this hybrid is very evocative.

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