Reserve yours today! read the email. There is a Christmas Tree shortage this year.
Heidi and I had been working to find the right time for this fun holiday chore, and this message galvanized me. Never mind the cold front sweeping through our region— wind chill be damned! We had to get our tree today!
So I picked her up from school at 3, and we headed out to a local nursery—the very one who had sent me the email. The lot was deserted when we arrived, and there seemed to be no shortage of trees, so we sat a moment in the warm car, scoping out the situation as clouds of random topsoil and mulch swirled by. At last, I switched off the ignition, put on my mittens, and walked into the icy wind toward the nearest row of Fraser Firs.
A couple of days ago, I heard a story on the radio about the challenges that Christmas Tree farmers in North Carolina, the leading producer of Fraser Firs, were facing: climate change, extreme storms, and a spreading root rot called Phytophthora (Latin for plant destroyer). As bleak as that all sounded, I also learned that there is a whole field dedicated to preserving resilient Christmas Tree DNA, and that made me happy.
Today, I pulled out the second tree in the first row of Frasers, and dang! It was perfect. This particular nursery happens to name all of their trees, as regular readers may recall, and this one was Heather. We walked around a bit to make sure, but we needn't have, in less than 10 minutes, Heather was tied to the top of our car, and we were on the way home.
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