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Our Christmas Tree…

The Town Tree has been the focal point of our wonderful lights for many many years, its actually the Town Councils tree, which we decorate for them - although a close working partnership with the Town Councils fantastic staff means as far as were all concerned, its just ‘the tree’.

The Tree comes from Longleat forest, and always has - we often get offered ‘better, cheaper, bigger’ trees by ransom passers by, including the most memorable whose ‘mate’ could get us a much better FRESH tree and cheaper, all the way from Norway - a offer he based on no knowledge of where the tree had come from, or what it cost! We choose the tree in around September time, we visit Longleat with a couple of our team and walk many miles to find the tree we think makes the grade. Its exceptionally difficult - the trees can be over 130ft high (see photo), and we are only interested in the top 40ft, often a tree that looks perfect from one side may be missing many branches on the other where its grown into another tree - as were always told by the Forester “ the only perfect Trees are on Christmas cards!”

A full size Graham, full size Civic, and a huge tree!

That said in 2010 we struck gold, after explaining to Graham that it would take hours to walk the forest in search of a Tree suitable, we literally walked into the final choice strait away, a minute from the forest path we were parked on - concerned its not that easy we carried on looking for a few moments, until deciding that was the one. A number of weeks later and the tree was delivered - its delivered by a contractor we have used for many years, he knows us, takes care of the tree on its short journey and works with Longleat to ensure that our tree is cut down just hours before its on its way to us.

The Tree is lifted into place by the lorrys crane, thats the easy part…

Staff from English Landscapes and the Town Council assist with any cutting and fitting the tree into place.

The Tree is lifted into place using the lorry, and lined up by eye ensure its strait and level, once sited, its not going to be easy to adjust! Staff from English Landscapes and the Town Council assist with any trimming using chain saws. The whole delivery process takes around 1 hour.

The 2010 tree was met with mixed reaction - some thought it was small, some that it was not very bushy, some loved it - including us. It was actually the tallest tree we had used to anybodies memory, and was absolutely perfect in shape, could it be that we had found our ‘Christmas Card tree’??

Once the Tree is in place, the assembly of a fence and installation of the lights starts by our team, this is the beginning of many many hours of hard work. Here’s a little more about what goes in the decoration…

The current star was created using a old metal star outline, which was stripped, treated and then painted. Many ideas were tried and as usual we played around with no real plan except to make it bright, and as good as possible!

The Final version has LED white rope light around its edges marking the Star outline, White 240V Strobe lamps were then wired into the outline to give the effect of twinkling, originally they were all set to go together, but after much tinkering a totally random set up was used - giving the wonderful twinkling effect we got.

The main Tree lights were actually made by us, rather than using main stream available lights we wanted to create a super bright multi-coloured tree unlike the single colours used before. Paul played around with numerous ideas until settling for a LED system running at 240V which was made up of individual strings of 100 LED’s each wired in sequence of colours and wired to enable total control of which colour was lit at any time. We used a total of 2600 LEDS spread over 26 individual strings, each grouped and controlled by a system made by us. The final design used the LED’s in sets to achieve a fast flickering between the major colours of RED, BLUE, GREEN and YELLOW, with the COOL WHITE LEDs told to stay on constantly.

The ‘snowdrop’ LED tubes were something which we had liked for many years, however were ridiculously expensive. The original idea was to incorporate them into the front of the Town Hall. Paul was confident that they would look good in the tree, and managed to secure purchase of around 30 tubes from a supplier for ‘not a lot’ of money, and the tubes were actually larger and brighter than the others that had been offered at around £500 for 10 tubes! The flaw - they each needed individual wiring and programming, meaning each tube needed 4 wires connecting to a main system. The effect of random falling ‘snow drops’ is amazing, and really brought the tree to life. Check the Youtube video in our gallery to see the lights in action!

The overall effect we hope you agree was stunning, and unfortunately extremely difficult to catch on camera! In total the tree took 2 days to complete - a total of around 30 hours. How can we do better for 2011??? Wait and see!