"At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green.''
-- from "Burning the Christmas Greens'' by William Carlos Williams
Robert Paradise can remember when he was young, and everyone's Christmas tree was a cedar -- one of the state's native evergreens.
But tastes in trees change. Paradise now runs a Christmas tree farm in Redding. He raises concolor fir, balsam fir and three kinds of spruce -- white, blue and Norway -- for his customers.
"Some people don't know what they want until they see it,'' Paradise, 64, said.
But we do know what we want: trees that are densely needled, that are nicely shaped in a triangle -- a tree to hang strands of lights, dozens of ornaments on. Our native greens don't quite fit the bill.
And so we get spruces -- trees that grow to the north of us. Or Douglas and concolor fir, Western species. Or Fraser fir, a tree that really belongs in the southern Appalachians.
For tree farmers, growing the species they choose has to do with what their customers want, along with what the deer don't browse.
"They love Douglas fir, they love Fraser fir,'' said Stephen Paproski of Paproski's tree farm in Newtown of the omnipresent white-tails.
But they leave spruce alone.
"It's a deer-resistant tree,'' he said.
Glenn Dreyer, director of the Connecticut College arboretum and president of the Connecticut Botanical Society, said there are only a few common native evergreens in Connecticut. They include white pine, pitch pine -- aka candlewood -- red cedar, juniper and hemlock.
Here and there in the state, there are other evergreens -- black spruce and larch, which like boggy land. (The red pine left in the state were mostly planted by humans in dense planations. An infestation by an insect, the red pine scale, killed most of them.)
Pitch pine grows along the sandy coastline and in river valleys -- obviously, in the Housatonic River Valley, if the candlewood name means anything.
Hemlock is a woodland species, important because it can tolerate shade much more than other evergreens. It is also the species that ecologists worry about a lot -- an insect, the woolly adelgid, is killing hemlocks in the state.
Red cedar and white pine are the trees that grow when a pasture is abandoned.
"You see them growing in old fields,'' Dreyer said. "They need lots of light. They don't do well in closed canopies.''
In general, he said, cedars are the trees that colonize fields in the southern part of the state, while white pine is more common in the north.
There's another evergreen that doesn't quite make it in Connecticut as an evergreen --native American holly. (Ditto, ivy. When we sing about the holly and the ivy in Connecticut, we're singing about things we planted in our front yards and along our walls.)
Dreyer said there are holly trees that grow wild on Fire Island --the barrier islands off Long Island -- and in Rhode Island and on Cape Cod.
To say they don't grow wild in Connecticut, he said, is to ignore that Connecticut should really be considered part of the botanical continuum that's southern New England.
"Connecticut really is just lines we drew on a map,'' he said.
So as we celebrate Christmas, take a look at a white pine or a juniper. They may be unshapely, or in the case of white pines, too soft-boughed to make a good living room tree. But they're the greens of our landscape.
Some people still want to bring them indoors, to keep the winter gods at bay -- in William Carlos William's words the greenery that at Christmastime is "a solace, a promise of peace, a fort against the cold.''
"I got a call this year,'' Paradise said. "Someone wanted to buy a cedar.''