COUNTRY SKILLS: Keep A Living Christmas Tree

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But like yourself, perhaps, I'm midway between the parent and grandparent generation. Sad in one sense and greatly re lieved in another, nobody in the immediate family is young enough to believe in Santa anymore. And though I never gave it a second thought when the children were young, I don't feel justified in killing a tree for a few weeks' decoration in a small, childless house. It seems frivolous—even if it was a plantation-grown tree that would never have seen life without being planted by a tree framer or a wild tree doomed to being shaded out in the woods.

No, saving one Christmas tree a year isn't a big deal when whole mountainsides are being clear-cut in Washington State, thousands of acres of Colorado burn each summer, and even more tropical forest is slashed and burned each day around the equator.

But it makes me feel good. It saves $35 or more as well.

How to Save a Tree

Whatever the reason, I dig a young evergreen out from the deep woods each fall, invite it into the house for a week or two around Christmas, then plant it out in full sun, around the boulder-strewn end of the pasture meadow. The land is so rocky there that you can't mow a crop of hay off it with anything but a long scythe with a short blade. But evergreen trees are notable rock perchers. These refugees from the woods will force their roots between the stones and enjoy themselves for a century or two.

When prospecting for young trees, you'll want to pick individuals that have grown a single trunk in a more or less regular shape. Skip deformed or multiple-trunk trees—with trunks and limbs broken by falling limbs and clumsy passersby. Many will outgrow their deformities if given twenty years' undisturbed growth, but Santa prefers symmetrical trees.

Don't try to move a hemlock (an evergreen with branches arranged irregularly around the trunk; mature trees have cinnamon-red and well-furrowed bark, flat needles with rounded or notched ends, and small cones). You can transplant any other small evergreen from the woods if you pick the right time of year and respect the tree's roots.

Any tree's root system is a mirror image of its visible growth in mass, but it is seldom the shape of aboveground growth. Most evergreens have a shallow, pancakeshaped root network, with several large root trunks growing out from the trunk in a wheel spoke pattern and through the topsoil lying just beneath the layer of dark, fluffy loam that carpets the forest. Small, fragile feeder roots grow in a dense network up into the loam to take in water. A few wiry roots go down into the subsoil for minerals. If you just jerk the tree out, feeder roots will be shucked off and all you'll get are the main root trunks. Such "bareroot" treatment is OK for tiny evergreen seedlings, but it will kill an older tree.

Feeder roots are most dense in a ring around the tree's drip line. To "tame" a tree, you prune the root system at the drip line, forcing dense root growth close to the trunk. But that takes a year at least.

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