The Gardens Group is offering customers who buy their Christmas trees from Brimsmore Gardens in Yeovil, Castle Gardens in Sherborne and Poundbury Gardens near Dorchester a free Christmas tree collection service throughout January.

With the local councils no longer offering this service, The Gardens Group wants to make sure people have an option to recycle their trees and stop them ending up on landfill.

Collected Christmas trees will be shredded for compost and mulch and will eventually be used for soil improvement projects around the local area.

Mike Burks, managing director of The Gardens Group, explains: “There is nothing quite like a real Christmas tree, but we need to make sure that they have a minimal impact on the environment, so we want our customers to be reassured that we’ll dispose of their Christmas trees in an environmentally friendly way, which will in fact help with our gardening and wildlife projects in the future.”

Free Christmas tree collection vouchers can be picked up in each garden centre from the end of November onwards.