But on Roan Mountain, a ridge in Tennessee about 6,000 feet high, many firs still stand. In some native fir stands, the adelgid has killed more than 90% of the trees. “It’s had a devastating effect here,” Neufeld said. Die-offs spread rapidly in the ’70s and ’80s. By the 1960s, people were noticing dead trees in the forests. Slowly, it began to attack native fir trees. The insect is tiny, about the size of a grain of sugar, so it wasn’t immediately spotted. They imported trees from Europe, including the silver fir, which carried the adelgid on it. In a push to reinvent the area around tourism, wealthy landowners and the government decided to replant the highest peak in the Appalachians, Mount Mitchell. Howard said it arrived in the region after extensive logging, at the turn of the 20th century. That triggers abnormal growth and makes the trees unable to take up water, which eventually kills them. The balsam woolly adelgid injects a toxin into trees. “Ten years later, almost all those trees had died from the adelgid.” “You walked through this dark, dank forest with Fraser firs and a couple of spruce sticking up above you, with moss on the ground and lichens hanging from branches,” he said. When he graduated high school in the 1970s, he and two friends took a trip to the Smoky Mountains and hiked, Neufeld said. That’s due to the balsam woolly adelgid, a bug that can be controlled on a farm, but not in a forest.īiologist Howard Neufeld, who teaches at Appalachian State University, has witnessed its destruction firsthand. Most of the trees are Fraser firs - their needles don’t shed as much as other evergreens, and they have limbs strong enough for ornaments.īut these prized Fraser firs, which millions of families put up in their homes for Christmas, have become more rare in the wild.
It’s an important, nearly $90 million-dollar industry for the state, which produces more than 4 million trees per year. North Carolina grows more Christmas trees than any other state except Oregon. He grows about 95,000 firs on his operation. Joey Clawson at one of his Christmas tree stands on the first day of harvest. “Because it’s all about creating family memories,” Clawson said.
If Clawson spots an outbreak - of various aphids, mites, hemlock scale, or the balsam woolly adelgid - he sprays with insecticide.Īll in the name of a perfect Christmas tree. Pests have become a problem on tree farms like Clawson’s, which tend to be lower in altitude than the trees’ native range. “That’s a lot of hours I’m spending taking care of my trees.” “It’s four to five months that I’m out here weekly, with magnifying glass, checking bunches of trees in every field,” Clawson said. For nearly a decade before harvest, workers fertilize individual trees by hand, shape them one by one with giant machetes, and, if needed, help them fight pests. He has about 95,000 trees in the ground, of various sizes and ages. It took just a few seconds to chainsaw each tree, which Clawson has spent years pampering. On the first day of cutting at Joey Clawson’s Christmas tree farm, in the mountains outside Boone, North Carolina, four workers picked their way through Fraser firs planted in neat rows.
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