UPDATE: Big spread in the Washington Post about this tree’s role in the campaign to save the Red Spruce. (Paywall troubles? Try accessing it through your public library’s website.)
Ceremony in NC for the 2022 Capitol Christmas Tree – with folk singers, and the Cherokee boy chosen to light the tree.
I got a nice email from “long-time” reader Nina Shippen in Brevard, NC with a story idea:
I’m writing because I thought you might be interested in the story of this year’s Capitol Christmas tree – “Ruby.” She’s an 80-some foot Red Spruce harvested from Pisgah National Forest near Brevard NC, where I live. (Asheville is the more widely known reference).This probably happens every year with the Capitol Christmas trees, but people here have been pretty excited about her send-off, and our local Ranger District for Pisgah National Forest did a really great job in involving the locals at her launch last week. Everyone here knows at least one person involved in the show – the sawyer, the Forest Service people, the guy who owns the participating Bartlett Tree Company, the musicians who played on the Blue ridge parkway for the opening ceremony….
The ceremony and cutting took place just off the Blue Ridge Parkway – the truck drove down to the tree’s location, then had to back up for two miles on mountain switchbacks to get to the Parkway – took two hours.For the ceremony, the musicians are Woody Platt and his wife Shannon Whitworth performed. Woody until recently was the lead singer for the Steep Canyon Rangers, a Brevard-based blue grass group who has made it big. The Secretary of Agriculture for the Eastern Band of Cherokees takes the mike and introduces this year’s tree lighter, a young Cherokee boy.
A Tree Named Ruby
“Ruby” before and after being felled.
Ruby (somehow a “she”) is an 78-foot Red Spruce, a tree that’s currently threatened, and locals are working to stabilize and expand its territory. The person who cut it down – whom I’ve learned is called a “feller” – is a long-time Forest Service employee honored to be chosen to do the deed.
UPDATE Does this Make you Sad? Nina Responds in a Comment:
No push back here – you’re right, it is sad. But here is a palliative – Ruby is named after the Red Spruce, Picea Rubrum. It was selected out of several because it checked all the boxes: beauty contest; growing near to the road so no damage to surroundings in removing it; and maybe most important – the endangered Carolina Northern Red Squirrel was not nesting, nor were the spiders and other insects dependent on it. A Forest Service ecologist climbed the tree and searched for the critters and found none.
The Red Spruce population of the Southern Appalachians is disjunct – as the last glacier receded, it moved northeast up the Appalachian chain and up our mountains in search of cooler weather, until it got to the mountain tops and formed a unique ecology. Its ecology supports several insect, animal, and plant species who are dependent on it. Red Spruce stands are threatened, for several reasons. Ruby has served as an ambassador along its route, informing people about her singular ecology and the need to preserve and grow existing stands.
Her seeds were collected and will be grown for reforestation efforts at the Southern Highlands Reserve, a private non-profit working with the Forest Service to grow and plant tens of thousands of Red Spruce saplings. I see them when hiking, growing into forest communities. When her display at the Capitol is finished, Ruby’s wood will be used for making guitars by a local instrument maker.
Harvesting from one of our tree farms would seem feasible, but they grow Balsam Firs for the most part. Besides, the Capitol Christmas tree always comes from national land, like the Pisgah Forest.
The Journey to DC
It’s not easy transporting a 78-foot tree. It had to be wrapped (its branches range from 20 to 8 feet in diameter) and watered with 50 gallon water bags.
Here’s the route it took, and I love that it was greeted as a star at every stop it made. Depending on the year, the tree may visit as many as 25 communities along the route to DC.
Above, on Veterans Day the tree stopped at the NC State Veteran’s Home in Kinston, NC. The tree also stopped in Cherokee, NC, home community of the tree’s 9-year-old official lighter.
Arrival in DC
There was lots of coverage of the arrival of the tree and the Architect of the Capitol Facebook page provided rare up-close photos of the installation.
The Ornaments
The tree is always decorated with home-made ornaments from each state. This year North Carolinians sent over 7,500 to DC to adorn this and other holiday trees at the Capitol.
UPDATE This afternoon I visited the tree and got photos like the one below of the decorations:
The Lighting
You can watch the whole lighting event here, with speeches and music and at about 39:40 the tree-lighter is introduced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “our VIP of the evening.” He reads his winning essay in the contest that chose this year’s lighter.
The Tree has Followers
U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree page
I know I’m going to get push back for this, but it does make me sad. We’re supposed to be planting…
That was my first thought too. A lovely tree and story but perhaps it could have been sourced from a tree farm closer to home.
And not of a threatened variety.
To the first three commenters, come back now please and reread Nina’s newer comment. They ARE replanting.
And many of us Americans do still want to see a newly felled (for whatever reason)
fresh Christmas tree in our special holiday places.
The Forest Service knows what it’s doing.
Have a little trust!
No push back here – you’re right, it is sad. But here is a palliative – Ruby is named after the Red Spruce, Picea Rubrum. It was selected out of several because it checked all the boxes: beauty contest; growing near to the road so no damage to surroundings in removing it; and maybe most important – the endangered Carolina Northern Red Squirrel was not nesting, nor were the spiders and other insects dependent on it. A Forest Service ecologist climbed the tree and searched for the critters and found none.
The Red Spruce population of the Southern Appalachians is disjunct – as the last glacier receded, it moved northeast up the Appalachian chain and up our mountains in search of cooler weather, until it got to the mountain tops and formed a unique ecology. Its ecology supports several insect, animal, and plant species who are dependent on it. Red Spruce stands are threatened, for several reasons. Ruby has served as an ambassador along its route, informing people about her singular ecology and the need to preserve and grow existing stands.
Her seeds were collected and will be grown for reforestation efforts at the Southern Highlands Reserve, a private non-profit working with the Forest Service to grow and plant tens of thousands of Red Spruce saplings. I see them when hiking, growing into forest communities. When her display at the Capitol is finished, Ruby’s wood will be used for making guitars by a local instrument maker.
Harvesting from one of our tree farms would seem feasible, but they grow Balsam Firs for the most part. Besides, the Capitol Christmas tree always comes from national land, like the Pisgah Forest.
I very much agree with the first 3 comments.
Me too 🙂 Seeing the pictures of her bound and carried by the crane and then set into position brought tears to me eyes. She had a place of honor in the forest from which she was taken and stood tall and alive. It feels like a travesty for her to have been felled so people can decorate and gawk at her, now dead. I know most people don’t feel as some of us do, but those some of us feel deeply for the trees and their own right to life.
Newly felled trees are not really dead, they are very much alive as I’ve dragged limbs into my yard when neighbors had cut trees down, and enjoyed for years the interesting fungi, wasps, spiders, and other creatures emerging from the tree now feeding the environment. Instead of making Ruby into furniture, which certainly will kill her living wood, why not put her back into the forest from where she came…she may be a Mother Tree and her nutrients needed by the younger trees in her vicinity.
Please note that a team of foresters collected cones from Ruby; seeds from those cones will generate seedlings that will be part of the next generation of Red Spruce in the southern Appalachians.
If you go to the link for the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree page, above, and scroll down to see the sponsors, they are mostly logging companies (“forestry”), trucking companies, siding companies and one (STIHL) that makes chain saws.
I do not agree with cutting down trees in forests or other natural areas for any reason other than the tree was diseased.
And I can’t help but think of the book The Education of Little Tree where the 8 year old Cherokee was stunned and sad at the orphanage where a Christmas tree was decorated. He could not understand why “anyone would cut down a perfectly good tree.”
Even I wouldn’t go that far. One of the reasons for the severity of wildfires is the lack of management for too much undergrowth, which dies, and becomes tinder for fire.
I am glad they saved seeds from the tree and grateful they checked for wildlife. Still, I find the death of a tree for a few weeks (months?) of consumerist pretties to be too far. I wonder if there’s something better we could do with land than Christmas tree farms. It’s better than another subdivision of McMansions or factory farms, but we can still do better.
We could, instead, cease to have Christmas trees adorning our public places. And, then, why not just ban public displays of Christmas decorations? While we’re at it, we may as well ban (and remove) marble from our public buildings. It is, after all, a non-renewable resource. Grey cinder block has a more egalitarian feel to it.
In no time we could adopt the aesthetics of the old Soviet Russia.
Bah, Humbug!
Thank you, John. Sometimes the almost-professional Purity of some folks on here does get annoying.
It’s ONCE a year! Deal with it, purists.
Thank you Nina and thank you Susan. I found this post heartwarming and mega-informative. Loved the map! And the inclusion and involvement of the local Cherokee is totally appropriate & appreciated.
To learn more about Ruby’s role in the campaign to save the red spruce, I recommend this spread in today’s Washington Post about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/11/28/capitol-christmas-tree-red-spruce/ (If you hit a pay wall, the Post can often be accessed through public libraries.)
Susan, thank you for sharing this story. It not only connects other states to the Capitol, it connects people – those working together all over the country in conservation, in reforestation, in celebration, and in joy of this Christmas season. Re: the sadness of some of the commenters. While I am a firm supporter of forests and conservation efforts, I think that it is always a grave mistake to anthropomorphize trees and plants (I know it was not your doing). It skews our perspective from a rational one (this tree’s journey brings to the National stage conservation efforts that might otherwise be ignored) to an emotional one (“seeing the pictures of her bound and carried by the crane and then set into position brought tears to my eyes”). It’s hard to see the big picture when our eyes are full of tears. – MW