Try a living tree this year to remember Christmas 2019

There is one kind of tree that will keep on giving long after the neighbor’s noble fir has been stripped of tinsel and dragged out to the curb for recycling.

A live tree with roots intact, brought in for a few days of holiday cheer, can be replanted in the landscape and enjoyed not just at Christmas but year-round and for years to come.

With less than a week to go before Christmas Eve, it may seem late in the season to buy a tree. And the stock of available living trees will be low.

Rick Williams, owner of Harmony Farm Supply and Nursery in Sebastopol, urged shoppers to call to check on availability before heading out to shop. Many nurseries and garden centers will be thin on inventory or sold out.

But if you can manage to locate a living tree, procrastination can be a plus. A live tree in a pot shouldn’t be kept indoors for very long. If you buy one now, you can trim it and enjoy it until New Year’s before planting it in the ground as a remembrance of Christmas 2019.

While a living tree tends to be smaller and more expensive than a cut tree, it is an investment for the future. And if it doesn’t fit in with your landscape theme, or you decide you don’t want to keep it, there are several nurseries and farms where you can return the tree right after Christmas for a good cause.

The Lake County Gifting a Tree Project will claim gently used living trees and donate them to someone who lost a home and landscape in any one of the devastating firestorms that ripped through the North Coast in the last few years.

The program was launched four years ago by Kathy Blair of Cobb, who had the idea of buying a living tree as a Christmas gift for her best friend after the Valley fire laid waste to her property.

“I got to wondering if anyone else would be interested. So I reached out and got in touch with some nurseries. I had no idea it was going to take off,” said Blair, who was expecting to garner about 100 trees to reforest the private landscapes of Lake County residents.

Instead, that year, she wound up inundated with donations of 900 living Christmas trees, which she picked up her herself with the help of family members. The next year she had the idea of allowing people to return trees to participating nurseries to make pickup easier.

This year, 11 nurseries have signed on. People can buy a living tree and return it after Christmas for re-gifting. Many of the nurseries will accept any living Christmas tree, even if they didn’t sell it.

Blair said since 2015, approximately 2,200 living trees have been sold and given away under the program, which has been expanded to serve victims of any of the recent firestorms in Lake, Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties.

“I think it’s a fantastic program,” said Gerald Cramer, manager of MIX Garden in Healdsburg, one of the participating nurseries. MIX deals mainly in landscape materials and design and construction, but it also sells some seeds and fertilizers, as well as a small selection of living trees around Christmas.

“We’ve had a lot of people calling about it ... just to be a part of the gifting a tree project,” Cramer said.

The variety of living trees tends to be smaller than for fresh-cut trees. A living tree must be adapted to the local climate if it is to thrive in the ground.

Cramer said MIX carries Leyland cypress and several varieties of pine: Monterey, Aleppo and Italian stone. They also carry small 1-gallon fragrant rosemary bushes that have been trimmed into the shape of a Christmas tree, perfect for a tabletop or on a porch or walkway.

The gray-green Leyland cypress is a hybrid of a Monterey cypress and an Alaskan cedar and is often used for hedging.

“It’s one of the top screening trees in the landscape industry. It can making a living screen when you can’t build a fence,” Cramer said.

The Aleppo pine, dense, with a tint of blue, is a hardy tree with a high survival rate once planted. Monterey pines are also well adapted to the California coastal climate, having originated on the Central Coast. And they grow fast, reach a height of 7 feet after only three to four years.

The stone pine is a Mediterranean coniferous evergreen that needs good-draining soil and full sunlight exposure. It can be grown in large pots as a patio or walkway plant. But planted in a landscape, it can reach heights of 40 ?to 80 feet and widths of 20 to 40 feet.

Some people don’t think about the eventual tree size, figuring they won’t be around to deal with it. But look around the North Bay and you’ll see many redwoods, foolishly planted in the 1950s in small suburban yards, that now tower over tiny houses and engulf the landscape.

Terry Sthymmel has been experimenting with living Christmas trees for several decades on his little tree farm in Penngrove. He expects to have a few trees still on hand for last-minute shoppers.

The avid hobby farmer, who also participates in the gift a tree project, has tried every evergreen imaginable in his quest to find the ideal Christmas trees. Now his landscape is a mixed forest of disparate varieties. However, only a handful have made the final cut, being replanted into pots and sold as living Christmas trees.

But he’s allowed many others to remain, including mature redwoods and Leyland cypresses. One type that didn’t work out was the Arizona cypress. Native to the Southwest, it is drought-tolerant. But Sthymmel said shoppers just didn’t take to them.

He keeps many of those rejects as “trophy trees” so visitors can see what a seeding would look like fully grown in the landscape.

Visitors to his 5-acre Sunshine Living Christmas Trees looking for one to take home and decorate may choose a Turkish fir, a blue spruce, a Scotch pine or perhaps a Douglas fir.

Sthymmel is fond of the Turkish fir, whose dark green needles are short, soft and waxy.

“It’s just fabulous,” he said, stroking the branch of one planted in his experimental forest. “A lot of people have trouble with the blue spruce because it’s pokey, like Scotch pine.”

The best living trees for this region are Douglas fir, Norway spruce, Grand fir and Scotch pine.

One of his best tips for anyone thinking of buying a live Christmas tree for replanting is to mulch generously. This will keep the soil cool, moist and enriched.

Sthymmel maintains you can keep a tree in a pot for a couple of years. Just make sure the pot is big enough for the roots to grow and re-pot or plant in the ground before it becomes root-bound. He also cautioned not to overwater, a mistake many people make with potted trees. He waters his potted trees once a week and keeps them out of full afternoon sun.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.