Selection and Care of Christmas Trees for the Home

David Moorhead – Professor of Forestry, The University of Georgia

Live Christmas trees have been brought into homes and decorated during the holiday season for more than 500 years. Each year, more than 33 million live Christmas trees are used in households across the United States. Live Christmas trees have an attractiveness, fragrance, and tradition that cannot be matched with artificial substitutes.

Christmas trees are grown throughout the United States and Canada, and you can choose your tree from a wide variety of species. It takes five to 12 years to grow a Christmas tree, and for each tree harvested, two or three seedlings will be planted.

You can select your live Christmas tree from a local retail lot, where there can be a variety of trees from the United States and Canada. Or you can visit a local choose-n-cut Christmas tree farm to cut a fresh tree from the field where it was grown.