‘Tis the season for conifers – whether decorating them for a bit of Christmas cheer or simply serving as a vibrant, lush contrast to their bare deciduous companions.
What you may not appreciate is that conifers, which grow and flourish year-round along with other evergreen plants, have played some surprising roles in American history. Take eastern white pine. It decorated the first coins minted in the British colonies. Meanwhile, spruce lumberjacks in the early 20th century helped secure some key labor rights, including the eight-hour workday and overtime pay.
Cornell University environmental economist Trent Preszler highlights these stories and more in his new book Evergreens: The Trees That Shaped America,
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scientific American sat down with Preszler to learn more about the book and the stories told within it.
,An edited transcript of the interview follows.,
How did this book come about?
I was shopping for Christmas trees at this tree farm on Long Island, and they had rows of artificially spray-painted, fluorescent neon Christmas trees like Dr. Seuss – pink and purple and green and yellow – and they were selling like hotcakes. And I just thought, “What, isn’t basic Evergreen enough for us? Do we have to make it into this flashy, commercial product?”
As I dug deeper, it became clear that I could only possibly understand the biography of America seen through a singular lens of Christmas trees.
Which tree came before conifers? What was that ancestral tree like and why is it important even today?
Archaeopteris 367 million years old, and was actually the precursor to our modern trees. It was the first tree found in the fossil record that had the vascular structure we now recognize in trees with a rigid central stem. It almost looked like a top-heavy Christmas tree with these fern-like leaves on top.
They simply dominated the Earth’s surface – and eventually developed what we now know as evergreens. That pedigree is part of what gives Evergreen this resiliency. They actually evolved in harsh climates, thriving in places where almost nothing grows.
but all that Archaeopteris Trees died and fell into anaerobic swamps and, over millions of years, they were compressed into what we now know as coal. We’re essentially powering our economy and American society on dead prehistoric Christmas trees.
Pine tree shillings were minted in Massachusetts in 1652.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Let’s flash forward a bit. How did conifers shape American history? Can you share some of your favorite stories?
A favorite story is the Pine Tree Riot. Great Britain first came to America because the trees there were gone. The British needed large, thick, strong cedar trees to make masts for the Royal Navy, and they could not get them from the forests of Europe, so they sent Pilgrims to America to basically cut down trees to send back to Britain. The common legend is that the Pilgrims were religious separatists, but they were actually timber traders sent here to find wood for the Taj. But the colonists rebelled, and they beat up the King’s forest surveyor in a tavern in Vere, NH, in what became known as the Pine Tree Riot, which inspired the Boston Tea Party a year later.
During World War I, the Allies were in desperate need of flexible, tough, fibrous wood to make airplanes. Fighter aircraft were still in their infancy and their fuselages were made of wood. So the Army mobilized a massive labor force of hundreds of thousands of military personnel who converged on the Oregon and Washington state coast to harvest Sitka spruce, which they called airplane spruce. And it really turned the tide of the war.
It touches on many parts of our history – the good and the bad, the extraordinary and the wonderful and often the shocking.
A view of a military logging camp in Washington State during World War I.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Tell us something about the research that went into this book. How did you discover these conifer stories?
It was a journey of two years. I traveled across the country, to about 20 states, visiting lumber mills and forests and historical archives and indigenous reservations. It was like almost every time I got a story and I pushed that thread forward, there were more people waiting for me. I learned a lot from writing this book and it was enjoyable.
Do you have a favorite conifer?
I love Douglas-fir. It’s kind of strange and mysterious – it’s not actually a cedar, but botanists don’t know how to classify it. It grows these ramrod-straight stems with very hard wood. It is very good for construction, and this is also the reason for its demise. It was very valuable to the construction trade, and especially during the housing boom after World War II, when suburbia was originally invented on Long Island. Douglas-fir was the most readily available evergreen softwood lumber at the time, and it became the primary lumber for building businesses.
It also makes a really pretty Christmas tree. If you cut one young, under 10 years old, it is still bushy and looks bushy. If you let it grow for 50 to 100 years, it is a massive tree with no branches on the first 80 feet of its trunk. It transforms itself from youth to adulthood.
This is my favorite because it straddles this line: It is a deeply commercial and economically important physical product to America’s economy, and it also captivates us and keeps our imagination going around Christmas.
As far as Christmas trees specifically, what’s one thing you wish more people knew about them?
I just think that the best and purest thing we can do around Christmas is to get a real tree.
Over the past maybe 20 years, the plastics industry has done a great job of branding natural, real, live Christmas trees as harmful to the environment. But real Christmas trees do much more. They employ a local farmer. They often occupy places that are marginal, fairly rocky soils that are not good for growing other crops that might otherwise be turned into strip malls, so they are protecting America’s landscape. They’re natural, they’re completely biodegradable, and they return to the earth. And the Christmas tree farms themselves provide habitat for all kinds of wildlife, birds, other types of grasses and wild flowers.
What’s a fun science fact about conifers that you would share at a party?
What makes their wood so good for construction is that they have a different cellular structure than hardwood trees. Maple or oak, if you look at them under a microscope, their wood consists of millions of tiny cells that are rounded and rubbed together like a random mosaic. But the wood of evergreen coniferous trees looks like Lego bricks, with smaller, smaller rectangles lined up right next to each other in this perfect lattice work. This is beautiful to me – their hardness as wood is actually based on the cellular level. I think it’s attractive.
