The Secret to a Fuller Christmas Tree Is Hiding in Your Yard

If you’re looking for a fuller tree this holiday season, the answer might be hiding in plain sight in your garden — or even at your local Trader Joe’s or garden center. You heard it here first: Cut hydrangeas actually make the most elegant Christmas tree filler, particularly if you’re going for naturalistic, Terrain-like vibes with your holiday decor.

Known for their showy flowers and long blooming season, hydrangeas make great tree filler for some of the same reasons they’re great filler plants in gardens and landscape design. As trees and shrubs, hydrangeas are dense and produce large blooms in a variety of colors — many of which work well with a traditional holiday palette (white, light green, pink, and even red). The conical and round shapes of these flowers make them easy to tuck into the gaps that Christmas tree branches have. 

If you’re lucky enough to have hydrangeas growing in your yard, they might be perfect for this purpose — especially if you like a little bit of a faded, softer palette for the holidays. Turns out panicle and smooth hydrangea varieties actually benefit from dead heading in the late summer, fall, or winter. Dead heading simply refers to removing flowers past their prime, cutting the stem back to the closest set of healthy leaves or a bud. Because you’re going to be drying the flowers anyway (“live” hydrangeas would work as filler, but would dry out after a few days), you don’t have to start with fresh blooms. 

But if you start with live flowers, that works, too. You can still find hydrangeas at places like Trader Joe’s and your local grocery store or garden center. Grab a bunch of stems, throw them in vases or a bucket, and then start the drying process.

Hydrangeas take a couple of weeks to truly dry out, so now’s the perfect time to start this project if you plan on trimming your tree right after Thanksgiving. All you have to do is put the flowers in vases or buckets full of two to three inches of water, and let the water evaporate naturally. 

Once your hydrangeas are “dry,” you can spray them with hair spray so they’re a little less fragile. Then all you have to do is place them in bare spots around the entire tree, hiding the stems as best as you can. You’ll get the best results from this process if you put the hydrangeas in after the lights but before the ornaments go up (you can always add more at the end, too). The flowers will likely shed a bit as you put them into the nooks and crannies that the tree branches create, but that’s part of the natural beauty of this look. You can use hydrangeas as tree filler for both real and fake trees. 

Want to re-create the festive scene here? You’ll need hydrangeas of your choosing, of course, and the rest of these pieces to round out the look.