Choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms in Australia

What "pick your own" actually means on a Christmas tree farm

This is the one piece of vocabulary worth getting straight before you drive anywhere, because the trade uses the same phrase for two quite different things.

• Choose and cut. You walk the plantation, pick a tree growing in the ground, and it is cut while you wait. This is what the farms on this page offer.
• Choose and tag. You visit in November, put your name on a standing tree, then come back in December to collect it once it has been cut. Two visits, and it is genuinely popular in Queensland.
• Pre-cut selection. You choose from trees already cut and leaning in a shed or a lot. Often advertised as "pick your own", and it is a perfectly good way to buy a tree, but it is not a farm visit and those businesses are not listed here.

Plenty of farms do more than one of these. A farm with a choose-and-cut paddock will often also sell pre-cut trees from a barn, and several deliver as well. Where that is the case the listing says so.

Christmas tree farms by state, and why the map looks like this

Victoria has the most farms by a wide margin. The state already grows radiata pine commercially, so the stock, the land and the pruning knowledge were all there before anyone sold a Christmas tree. Farms cluster on the Melbourne fringe: the Mornington Peninsula, the Dandenongs foothills, the Yarra Valley and out towards Ballarat.

Tasmania runs on booked sessions. Every Tasmanian farm found requires a booking, and several have dropped general opening altogether in favour of a handful of ticketed sessions. One farm's entire public season is four short sessions. Tickets are often a deposit that comes off the price of the tree, and at least one farm releases them on a fixed date in mid-November and sells out. Turning up on spec does not work in Tasmania the way it does in Victoria.

South Australia and Western Australia are day-trip businesses. Everything qualifying sits within about an hour of Adelaide or Perth. Neither state has a farm in its actual forestry country: South Australia's softwood is grown in the Limestone Coast and Western Australia's around Collie and Manjimup, but those trees go to market pre-cut rather than being sold at the gate.

Queensland is about altitude, not latitude. The state supports this at all because of high tablelands. The two farms furthest from a temperate climate are on the Atherton Tablelands and in the Granite Belt near Stanthorpe, both of which are markedly cooler than the coast around them. Coastal central Queensland has none, and Mackay and Townsville are served by pre-cut trees trucked from the tablelands. Queensland farms also lean heavily on the tag-in-November, collect-in-December model.

The Northern Territory has none, and that is a climate fact rather than a gap in this list. Neither the Top End nor the Centre supports radiata pine plantation. Real trees in Darwin come from interstate.

What is actually growing on these farms

Almost every choose-and-cut tree grown in Australia is Pinus radiata. It is worth knowing that Monterey pine and radiata pine are two common names for the same species, so a farm advertising one and a farm advertising the other are selling you the same tree. Fir and spruce, which dominate the northern-hemisphere trade, are not commercially grown for this purpose here.

Because the species is near-universal, farms compete on shape rather than variety. Hand-pruning two or three times a year is the standard claim, and it is what separates a dense, conical farm tree from a plantation timber pine. A few farms in warmer districts describe their stock as selected to cope with local summer conditions rather than naming a variety at all.

After Christmas

A number of farms now run a return-and-mulch service, and several offer it free to people who bought the tree there. Others hold January collection weekends, or will chip a tree brought back to the farm. If that matters to you it is worth asking when you buy, because it is rarely advertised prominently and it is not yet universal. Councils in many areas also run a green-waste collection that will take a tree once the decorations and stand are off it.