In 1839 the writer and artist Louisa Anne Meredith spent her first Christmas in Sydney. She wrote about meeting people in the streets of Parramatta “carrying bundles of beautiful native shrubs to decorate the houses”. No doubt the locals were hefting armloads of Christmas bush, Ceratopetalum gummiferum, they’d cut from the bush. We no longer cut it from the bush, which is illegal, but Christmas bush is still our favourite botanical Christmas decoration, bought by the armload.
Christmas bush lasts so well because the flaming red colour comes from the bracts, rather than the flowers they protect. The small white flowers are produced in spring and after they fall the four or five sepals that form the bracts grow and redden. The colour varies from pink to deep red, with intensity peaking around Christmas time, though they often continue to look good well into February.
Look for a variety called "Albery’s Red" which has great colour and gets to four or five metres high and two or three metres wide. Prune it by about a third straight after flowering to keep it dense and keep the colour where it can be reached.
There is also a dwarf variety called "Johanna’s Christmas". This was found by scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney who were on a twofold mission to identify locations of outstanding botanical diversity that should be set aside for nature reserves, and to find the northernmost distribution of Ceratopetalum gummiferum.
They found both up on the Queensland border at Evans Head, where the endemic Christmas bush included a natural dwarf form. In a story repeated up and down the coast, their recommendation to set aside the area as a reserve of stunning botanical diversity was ignored, the site became housing, and the only known population of wild-growing dwarf Christmas bush was destroyed.
Fortunately the plant material they collected was grown on and came into the possession of a keen member of the Australian Society for Growing Australian plants, Brian Roach. Years later Roach realised he had somehow become the only person in the world with a dwarf Christmas bush. He registered it as "Johanna’s Christmas" in 2001, after one of his daughters, and spent the next few decades working out how to propagate it reliably.
You can buy "Johanna’s Christmas" directly from Brian Roach at johannaschristmas.com.au and also find it at some garden centres. Roach says that in most gardens it will stay at about 1.5 metres high and wide, but will get to twice that in rich, moist, but well-drained soil and full sun. It will also grow happily in a pot, and responds well to pruning for shape – and for cutting as Christmas decoration.