$1B industry in quest for longer life
Researchers seeks genomic key to non-shedding needles
PUYALLUP, Wash . – A twometre evergreen will bear 350,000 needles, more or less. And if Gary Chastagner has his way this holiday season, precious few of them will end up on the parlour floor.
As a plant pathologist at Washington State University, Chastagner, 64, heads one of a half-dozen Christmas tree research labs in the U.S.
Recent months have found Chastagner frittering away his time on a multistate, $1.3million RNA-sequencing trial instead. By sampling trees he has tested for needle retention, Chastagner and his colleagues hope to discover the genes associated with shedding.
You may have noticed that Christmas sales now seem to pop up at the mall late in the summer. Partly as a result of this calendar shift, a third of this year’s Christmas tree purchases will come from a species called “artificial,” according to market research from the American Christmas Tree Association.
The corresponding riddle for Christmas tree farmers is how to cultivate a tree that will last from late November until after New Year’s.
This is where Chastagner’s latest research comes in. “It’s probably the largest single-funded Christmas tree project in U.S. history,” he said, sitting in his cluttered office. “Some people in the public would ask, ‘Why would we spend money on this?’ Well, the Christmas tree industry is a $1-billion industry.”
The tree trade group estimates that some 15,000 farms and plantations will sell more than 20 million trees this year. Perhaps a quarter of these will come from four- or six-hectare farms that use basic management techniques and primitive equipment, said Dennis Tompkins, an arborist who edited the American Christmas Tree Journal for almost two decades. The largest and most sophisticated operations will harvest almost a million trees a year from a 3,440-hectare plantation and remove them by helicopter.
For 32 years, Chastagner has conducted much of the most important research into Christmas-tree cultivation. He has examined Phytophthora root rot and the Swiss needle cast — both pernicious conifer scourges. And he has carefully analyzed the optimal shape and volume of a Christmas tree stand.
In 2007, Chastagner published the definitive peerreviewed paper on whether you can successfully hydrate a Christmas tree with an IV drip. (Quick answer: save it for Santa.)
The locus of these important efforts, it turns out, is a concrete-block outbuilding, half-bunkered into a hillock. Chastagner calls it the Dungeon.
Inside the Dungeon stood tables stacked with wire-and-wood racks. Each rack held hundreds of cut conifer branches — perhaps 5,000 in all — sticking up from their cells like quills in a dry inkwell. The whole open chamber was redolent with the stench of Christmas (or the fragrance, if you prefer).
This week’s samples of Fraser fir had arrived by express mail from John Frampton, a forestry geneticist at North Carolina State University. The broader project involved evaluating the mother trees for growth rate and habit, date of bud break, disease resistance and consumer preference.
Today’s experiment, however, was so particular as to seem monomaniacal. A solitary technician, Kathy Riley, was counting the needles that fell off each and every branch in the giant room.
Riley plucked an eight-inchlong sample from the rack and rubbed her bare fingers up and down the stems from the last two years’ worth of growth. Her palms were coated in resin.
Then, like a bingo caller, she intoned a pair of numbers: a percentage estimate of the needles that had ended up on the floor, based on a scale from one to seven. A data entry assistant plugged these numbers into a spreadsheet that appeared awesome in its size and breathtaking in its tedium.
Chastagner pointed to a few of the almost naked branches, which had porcupined their needles. “You see some pretty poor needle retention,” he said. “Also some winners, some with almost no needle loss.”
Both types of samples were useful. What the RNA detectives hoped to find was the single nucleotide polymorphism, or the variation, that controlled needle drop. One plant would have it and another wouldn’t. Scientists could employ this information to develop a genomic field test. Then cone collectors in wild forests or managed stands might quickly screen a tree before harvesting seed stock to sell to Christmas tree growers.
Ultimately, breeders could try to nurture a whole seed orchard of superior trees. But those maturing plants wouldn’t form cones and set seed for 30 years, Chastagner said. As if the runup to Christmas weren’t long enough already.
Until the 1970s, the Christmas tree found its way into the American household in a haphazard fashion, Tompkins said. “Wild culture,” he added, was the rule. Enterprising loggers would trek into the forests and haul to market whatever they found. In Washington, this usually meant a rough-and-ready Douglas fir. The Catskills or Nova Scotia might yield spruce or balsam fir.
Yet the newly cleared woods did not grow back the same way. In the Pacific Northwest, Chastagner said, previously shaded understory plants like salal and huckleberry celebrated their Christmas good fortune by “going crazy,” and evergreens that made it through the tangle developed stunted lower branches.
The managed Christmas tree plantations of the 1950s and ’60s weren’t necessarily raising showpieces, either. A 1964 Cornell University survey found that more than half the plantation-grown trees were unsalable.
Many trees and seed cones were leftovers from timber stands. There, lumber companies preferred fast-growing trunks with few of the lateral branches that produce knots in boards. Where to hang all the Christmas balls remained a mystery beyond the scope of science.
A fine place to witness how the Christmas tree has evolved is Ken and JoAnn Scholz’s Snowshoe Evergreen. The 142-hectare operation is just down the road from Chastagner’s office.
When the couple started in the business 40 years ago, Ken Scholz, 67, said: “You bought seed from whoever the hell would sell it to you. It was all in wild collections.”
The couple continues to operate a choose-and-cut lot and sells other trees to retailers. But Scholz does most of his volume as a contract seedling grower.
Up close, the grid of little green twigs had the immaculately ordered appearance of needlepoint. One advanced North Carolina grower had supplied him with a special selection of Fraser fir.
Check out the tops, he said, and you’ll see a whorl of five buds instead of the typical three or four. In a year, he might lift the entire planting, bed by bed, sort and grade the seedlings, and re-transplant them with a more generous spacing.
Before then, he’ll fumigate the ground with a mix of methyl bromide and chloropicrin to control weeds and stave off pathogens. Tens of thousands of plants could be spoiled by a handful of infected seedlings. “It’s almost a must in this business,” Scholz said. “There’s so much I can’t control, like the weather. If someone is entrusting me to grow plants for them, I’ve got to use best practices.”
The American Christmas Tree Association likes to tout the environmental benefits of buying “real,” carbonbased trees. Be that as it may, a Christmas tree plantation is decidedly not an organic farm. Chastagner has conducted some preliminary research into organic growing practices, experimenting with a variety of natural weed blockers.
How big, then, is the organic Christmas tree market? He answered without hesitation: “It doesn’t even register.”
When customers imagine a Christmas tree grower, they are probably picturing someplace like Bell’s Christmas Tree Farm, at the foot of the Catskills, 19 kilometres west of New Paltz, N.Y. Gordon Bell and his wife, Paula, live in a 1700s farmhouse at one end of the property, and their son and daughter-in-law, Brian and Lori Bell, recently built a home across the way.
The tree farm started almost as a lark, said Brian Bell. In Gordon Bell’s estimation, their Fraser and balsam firs have shown “exceptional needle retention.”
Yet extreme weather (which Brian Bell said could also be called routine weather) is hard on the Frasers.
“They need to be on great drainage,” his father said. “But they need water. Figure out that one.”