Cut your own Christmas tree in Australia
Choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms open for a very short window: late November until about the twentieth of December, and the good farms sell out of the best trees well before that. It is the one crop on this site with a hard deadline.
What Australia grows
The dominant Christmas tree here is the radiata pine, grown as a plantation crop and shaped over several years. Some farms grow Monterey pine or Douglas fir, and in the warmer states you will also find farms selling potted living trees. Australia does not grow the Nordmann fir that dominates the European trade, so the classic dense, soft-needled tree of northern Christmas photographs is not really the local product.
Expect a slightly more open, more fragrant tree with stiffer needles. It smells considerably better than anything artificial.
How choose-and-cut works
Most farms fall into one of two patterns. Either you walk the rows, choose a tree and cut it yourself with a saw the farm lends you, or you choose and tag a tree and a staff member cuts it. Both are advertised as cut-your-own, and it is worth checking which one a farm actually means if doing the cutting matters to you.
Trees are priced by height, and the range is wide. Most farms will net the tree for the drive home and many will trim the butt for you.
When to go
The first weekend farms open is the busiest of the year and has the best selection. If you want a particular height or a very full tree, go early. If you mainly want the outing, the second and third weekends are calmer.
Going too early has its own cost, though: a tree cut in late November has to survive three or four weeks of Australian summer indoors.
Keeping a tree alive in an Australian December
This is the part people get wrong, and it matters far more here than in a cold climate.
Cut the base again before it goes in the stand. A tree seals its own cut surface with resin within a few hours. Take a centimetre or two off the bottom and get it into water straight away.
Use a stand that holds real water, and top it up daily. A fresh tree can drink a couple of litres a day in the first week. Once the water level drops below the cut, the tree seals again and stops drinking for good.
Keep it away from the window and the air conditioning. Direct summer sun through glass will dry a tree out in days.
A well-watered radiata pine will hold its needles comfortably through Christmas. A dry one starts dropping within a fortnight and becomes a genuine fire risk.
Where they are
Christmas tree farms cluster around the capitals, because the product does not travel: the Dandenong Ranges and the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne, the Sydney fringe and the Canberra district, the Adelaide Hills, the Perth hills, and pockets in Queensland and Tasmania.
See Christmas tree farms across Australia, or find one on the map.
Updated 27 August 2026