Where do Christmas trees grow?

We like to look forward to Christmas, even when the happy day is three quarters of a year away. But the people who grow our Christmas trees must look ahead several years. A furry green tree must be grown patiently for four or five years before it is big enough to be trimmed with bright trinkets. The big Christmas tree in the middle of town may be ten or twenty years old.

A Christmas tree must be an evergreen. Its leaves are long, thin needles and it keeps them all year long. Cones that look like little woody pineapples nestle among the green, furry branches and for this reason our Christmas tree evergreens are called conifer trees. There are hundreds of different conifers growing acr ss our land, but some make better Christmas trees than others.

We want a tree that looks thick and bushy, crowded with furry green needles. Most people choose a young balsam fir tree with stubby needles growing all around its thin, brown twigs. About eight million balsam firs are sold as Christmas trees every year. Almost as many people choose a douglas fir tree which has needles a little longer than the balsam fir.

Conifers are hardy trees and they will grow almost everywhere. Some climb high up the snowy mountain slopes and some of them live in the dry deserts. Our biggest conifers grow in the north western mountains. Billions more lift their proud heads in the New England woods and still more crowd along the slopes of the Appalachian mountains through the Atlantic states.

Many of our Christmas trees are taken from these conifer areas, But a nurseryman can grow a crop of Christmas trees almost any where in the country.

The baby seedlings are straggly little plants, just a few inches tall. At the end of a year, each baby tree has only 75 needles. In five years it is just a few feet tall and it has grown about 2,300 needles. In ten years, it is a sizable tree with 16,000 needles.  The biggest outdoor Christmas tree may be 20 years old.

Almost all of the conifer trees spend their early years looking like Christmas trees. Long, lower branches brush the floor. Shorter and shorter branches climb up the trunk to a point at the tip. After ten or twenty years, the conifer may lose its lower branches and the furry green branches perch high up on the straight, sturdy trunk.