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Originally Posted by Cotham Marble  For those who want green decorations, ivy, holly and mistletoe are likely far more sustainable options.
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With those you'd be chopping back the branches with the berries (holly and mistletoe), or the branches that are about to be producing the vital late winter flowers and early spring berries (ivy). Food that is very important for our birds over the winter.
The christmas tree fields around here are good for wildlife, as it happens. They're not on prime agricultural land but on the more marginal land, but land which would otherwise be being used for silage. They are not weedkillered into a monoculture on barren soil, but have a good weed layer with abundant seeds. They seem to be used in part as additional cover for pheasants also. They provide very useful bits of habitat for wildlife in what is quite intensive agricultural land.
That being said, the last 2 'Christmas' trees of mine
were holly bushes that I bought from a local garden cente, in pots, which I kept like that for a few years until too big, and then they were planted in my garden - one is at my last house, the most recent one is part of my hedge now. I'm hoping to get some new ones from the berries I managed to salvage, before the birds had taken them all. As you can see, my tree is very wildlife friendly, and came already partly decorated with small red baubles
However I've also got two young sitka spruce trees growing in pots outside, for use in a year or two time - they were seedlings that had fallen off the back of an FC tractor (quite literally) when they were harvesting at their nursery. They'd have just died by the track edge, so have now got an extended life span.
Last year I came across a brown/dead Christmas tree still with B&Q label that had been dumped in the middle of Forestry Commission land in amongst the Sitka spruce. They'd gone well out of their way to put it there. And if you were wondering, nothing else had been dumped there, just the tree ... seemingly returned by its owners to be with its kind
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A way of being sustainable would be to pick up (borrow) a branch or two of fresh windfall plantation spruce/fir. Those trees do shed a lot of branches during the winter gales. Ok, so there would be marginally less sustainable brash, but if returned to the same spot a week or so later, the only unsustainable thing would be that incurred by transporting it home and back ...
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