The Science of Christmas Trees

A ninety-year-old Vermont farmer tells all.
Illustration of man with larger shears and small Christmas tree.
Illustration by Laurie Rowan

“This here is a fir that would be classified as a Charlie Brown tree,” Greg Williams declared, of a spare little cutting of balsam fir. “But prune it severely the first year and you can make a good tree.” Williams was demonstrating some of the knowledge that goes into tending a Christmas-tree farm. He broke a few needles off the fir, releasing the cough-drop intensity of their scent. He showed me the latent buds on the branches; they looked like little thimbles. Those were the spots to trim back to, Williams explained, as he clipped the branch with shears. “But that pruning strategy doesn’t work for a pine,” he said. He picked up another plausible Christmas-tree candidate, a white pine. “With this, you shear the tree when the new needles are half the length of the old ones.” He had two different sets of shears, but told me that many people prefer to simply use a long knife. “That’s faster,” he said. “But you have accidents. You use that and you’re going to have a slit boot, or stitches, or a dog with an injury.”

Williams, as a tree, is more of a Norway spruce than a Charlie Brown. Ninety years old, he wears a baseball cap probably seventy years his junior, and his green duck boots are unslit. He has unmissable blue eyes, is strong, and is distinguished by what many might call a Santa beard. He owns a conifer nursery in Wolcott, Vermont, and part of it is dedicated to Christmas trees, though he’s thinking of phasing them out, both because it’s heavy work and because he’s not sure that he’ll be able to see any current saplings grow large enough to sell. “You’ll find that most Christmas-tree growers are growing Christmas trees on their worst land,” he said. “On hills, rocky soil. The good land they’ll use for a cash crop, like marijuana.”

As a teen-ager, Williams liked to look for unusual trees and plants. His acreage today is populated in large part with what he calls “weirdoes I found in the woods.” There was a white pine in a weeping formation; a pine with needles that were curly rather than straight. Covering a broad swath of earth to the left of the nursery’s main path was a larch tree, a deciduous conifer that traditionally grows vertically; this one had grown outward. “Larch has a way of lighting up in the fall, when everything else has gone dormant,” he said, affectionately.

I was at the nursery with Ben Gaglioti, a paleo-ecologist and a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who worked for Williams at the nursery while he was a college student in Vermont. That was about fifteen years ago. Gaglioti said that at the time he didn’t know Williams’s age—he knew only that he worked very hard and that he had a unique collection of plants and trees. He described Williams’s nursery as “an autobiographical botanical canvas.” Gaglioti, who does research on conifer forests at the edges of glaciers, where they endure relatively rapid shifts in weather and climate, lived with Williams while applying to graduate school. A few times, on walks, Williams would find a four-leaf clover; Gaglioti never came across any on his own. “For some reason, my eye catches things that are not normal,” Williams said. “My first wife, for example. Sorry, sometimes I have too much of a sense of humor.”

According to Gaglioti, Williams has introduced “probably a hundred or so varieties,” some that he found and cloned and some that he invented via crossbreeding. Many horticulturists retain intellectual-property rights on the botanical lines that they develop, but that isn’t something that Williams has pursued, though there are a number of varieties that he has named, such as the Bear Swamp balsam fir, the Vermont Gold Norway spruce, and the Tiny Kurls eastern white pine.

Williams turned the conversation back to Christmas-tree farming, saying that, in addition to the basics—pruning, shearing, and weeding—one needed to learn how to wait eight to ten years.

“You plant because you’re optimistic, right?” Gaglioti asked Williams. The nonagenarian had recently got engaged to be married.

“More like I can’t break the habit,” he answered.

Evergreen conifers are among our oldest tree species. Picture a serene triceratops crunching on a pine tree and you won’t be too far off. Maybe all those years on the planet, surviving radical changes in climate and epochs of mega and mini-fauna, is part of why we attribute to firs characteristics like perseverance and endurance.

In 1419, the Freiburg bakers’ apprentices noted having seen a tree set up in a hospital, decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread, and tinsel. In Riga, in 1510, a brotherhood of merchants are said to have set up a tree around Christmastime, then decorated it with thread and straw; they burned it at Lent. Many of the hints of early Christmas-tree—or solstice-tree, or New Year’s tree—traditions come from rules limiting them. A regulation in Upper Alsace specified that each citizen could take from the forest no more than one pine, of a height no more than eight shoes. A 1611 ban against felling trees in the Alsatian town of Turckheim is arguably the first appearance of the term “Christmas tree”: Weihnachtsbaum. Goethe’s Young Werther, in the eponymous novel, talks to his beloved, Charlotte, about the joy that the appearance of a Christmas tree gives to young children; shortly afterward, he kills himself.

The tradition was for centuries avoided or disdained by Catholics. In Germany, the Protestant religion was sometimes dismissed as “the Tannenbaum religion.” (The Vatican didn’t put up a Christmas tree until 1982.) Americans today buy some twenty-five million Christmas trees a year, but Puritan settlers once viewed the trees with suspicion. In 1659, the government of Massachusetts Bay passed a law that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way . . . shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.” Christmas was not a school holiday until around 1870. But some people were still having fun. In 1823, the York, Pennsylvania, Society of Bachelors advertised that its tree would be “superb, superfine, superfrostical, shnockagastical, double refined, mill’twill’d made of Dog’s Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum fur; which cannot fail to gratify taste.”

This year, Williams is selling Christmas trees of three types: Fraser fir, balsam fir, and Korean fir. Gaglioti said that he’d probably take a Korean fir; they are characterized by soft needles with silvery undersides, which are dense on the branch. He would help harvest all the varieties, when it got cold enough. “It takes cold weather to get the needles to adhere to the tree,” Williams said. “It’s been like spring. But Christmas is around the corner.” If a fir tree is felled too early, the needles fall off. It was still early in November when I visited, but, once Williams decided it was time, the trees would be harvested, baled—wrapped in netting or twine—and trucked out to be sold.

Christmas trees are ultimately peripheral for Williams, whose heart is still centered in walks in the woods looking for curiosities. Walking away from the baler—bright red, imported from Michigan—and a patch of ground that he said was not a bad place to look for four-leaf clovers (“they’ve been there before”), Williams led Gaglioti and me toward a different part of the nursery. We walked past old pines that, because they were dwarf pines, were still the height of young pines, and also past magnolia trees strangely at ease in Vermont. A red squirrel made a chattering sound, and, when I asked about an unfamiliar bird call, Gaglioti said it was “a raven doing a weird raven thing.”

“Now this part is what they call my playground,” Williams said. We were in an Edward Lear illustration, a garden of oddness. The trees were mostly human-size, but top-heavy. Tall thin trunks, with bushy conifer crowns right at eye level. “That’s a dwarf maple grafted onto a regular maple,” he said. Nearby was an unusual juniper specimen on top of a cedar. I asked Williams why he grafted so high on the trunks. “Oh, for the hell of it,” he said.

Grafting is a very old practice—at least several thousand years old, maybe older—that lets you combine characteristics of different species of trees. The technique has often been used when blight hits a certain crop; cuttings of grapevine, for example, can be transplanted onto other rootstocks that are immune to blight. Grafting can also be done for ornamental reasons, or for play. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

“Some rootstock will accept species of a related type,” Williams explained. Much of what he had in his playground were “witches’ brooms”—dense nests of growth that look as if they’d do good housework if mounted on a stick—and other anomalous anatomies and growth patterns grafted onto more conventional rootstocks. You can create charming or useful varieties using this method: you might combine strength and beauty, or, as in a fruit hybrid, sweetness and hardiness.

“This is probably one of my favorites,” Williams said, pointing to something that looked like a Norway spruce, but bushier. I asked him what it was called. “You give it a name, and then it changes, and then it changes again.” He asked me if I had ever been to the botanical gardens in Montreal, from where I had driven down to see him. I said that I loved those gardens. “I used to have some friends up there,” he said. “Most of them disappear after sixty-five. I visited once, and saw a tree mislabelled, and after that they kind of lost my interest.” He praised the Canadian government, though, for having done the most research on how cold it needs to be for different varieties of fir or pine to be “hardened,” and ready to cut.

The landscape that we walked through was full of pits left behind when trees were moved. One foot in and one foot out of a hole, hesitating for a moment, Williams gave me a bit of advice: “Don’t ever get old.” Then he pulled himself out. He bent down to pull up a balsam-fir seedling. “I know it’s sad to pull it out,” he said. He pulled several more seedlings from the ground as we walked. “But it’s invasive. Even though it’s a Christmas tree.”

We had reached a path in his curious forest. “This is a hybrid Japanese white pine and regular white pine, weeping formation,” he said. It looked silvery and storybook-ish. Williams has been working with plants since before the Korean War, which he lucked out of, as he tells it, because the armistice was signed just as he was being “shipped over.” The boat that he was on “turned right instead of left,” dropping him off at Fort Wainwright, in Alaska, where he spent some time in vast forests of spruce. He later worked for a company that made generators for the oxygen tanks of rockets. The workers went on strike. “That’s how I got into this,” he said. While on strike, he made money finding and selling unusual trees. “It was less money, and the weather was often foul, but I enjoyed it. When the strike was over, I stayed working with these trees.” ♦