The Christmas Ficus

December 13th, 2016

Maybe it was the first sign of getting old… or turning Scroogey or becoming just plain lazy.

My ficus outside on the front porch before morphing into the Christmas ficus.

December had arrived, and it was time to go out and get the traditional cut evergreen to decorate for Christmas. We’d always done that when our kids were little.

But with the kids grown and gone and plans for our families to get together elsewhere, my wife and I wondered, “Do we really need to get a tree this year just for the two of us?”

That’s when my eye caught the 6-foot weeping fig (Ficus benjamina) tree in the living-room corner. I’d been growing this shiny-leafed beauty for about 8 years in a pot. I’d move it out to the front porch in summer, then back inside each fall.

Hmmmm. Why not decorate it?

So that’s what we did, and that was the beginning of our traditional Christmas ficus.

A lot of tree-like houseplants will serve this purpose if you’re looking for an alternative – or addition to – the usual cut needled evergreen.

If you’re a gardener, odds are you already have something that might work.

Besides a ficus, I’ve used an umbrella tree (Schefflera) that had grown to 6 feet tall in just a couple of years.

It had sturdy stems and big green leaves that supported and looked good with a string of lights, a few light-weight ornaments and some dried hydrangea and baby’s breath flowers saved from the garden.

Norfolk Island pine is a natural at converting into a Christmas tree.
Credit: Costa Farms

Another year, I used a Norfolk Island pine – a tender conifer that won’t survive our winters but that looks a lot like a soft-needled version of spruce.

Other possibilities are dracaena, croton, the cast iron plant, assorted palms and maybe even a jade plant or snake plant with a few years under their belts.

Just be sure to hose down or spray any plants before you bring them back inside in fall. You don’t want any bugs to hitch a ride in.

Also be sure to get tender potted plants inside when nighttime temperatures dip into the low 40s. Definitely before a killing frost.

Something else that intrigued me that I never tried is a technique that Franklin County Master Gardener Barbara Petrucci once mentioned.

Petrucci trains and pinches ordinary garden coleus into mini-trees or “standards.” Normally a bushy annual foliage plant that dies off at frost, coleus actually do nicely as potted plants if you get them inside before frost.

If you keep them a few years and keep pinching the lower shoots, you get what looks like a coleus tree of about 3 to 4 feet tall. The central stems thicken into a sort of woody trunk.

This works best with large coleus – not dwarf types – and it helps to use a stake to keep the weight of the foliage from toppling the plant.

What’s especially nice is that many coleus come in Christmasy red, burgundy and red-gold colors. The branches aren’t strong enough to support ornaments, but they can take small lights or light-weight decorations.

Once spring comes, you can move  your coleus Christmas trees back outside where they make attractive pot centerpieces surrounded by a trailer, such as sweet potato vines or begonias.