COLLECTING CHRISTMAS GREENS
Once upon a time everybody who wanted Christmas greens had the fun of gathering his own. That was in the generation when all the grandmothers lived in the country and only the plain fathers and mothers and children lived in the cities. But now we children have grown up and our children want to go to grandmother's house for Christmas just as we did. Can't you imagine how surprised and disappointed they are to find their grandmothers living in city houses, even in flats? Didn't we tell them about going out to gather holly and mistletoe and ground pine and hemlock and even how we used to cut the Christmas tree itself in grandpa's woods? In the middle West where Christmas trees do not grow in the woods we used to choose a shapely young oak. To make it look like an evergreen we used to get grandpa to go out with his big jack-knife and cut off the largest branches he could spare from the evergreens in the door yard. With good, strong twine we tied these to the branches of the oak. When all the decorations were on and the oranges and the apples and the popcorn strings and the candles and the presents, we children who had never seen a real live Christmas tree couldn't have told the difference. We didn't even mind the fact that some of the oak's outer branches were pine, some were spruce, some were cedar. It was all evergreen to us and all Christmassy. We were easy to please.
But now—alas! The gathering of Christmas greens has been commercialized. It has ceased to be fun, and has become a business. The boys and girls may share in the profits and perhaps get some fun out of it if they go about it right.
Holly, which of all the Christmas greens is the most popular, is a hardy and beautiful tree, which grows wild in great numbers in the Southern states and in the Chesapeake region. Many country boys and girls make easy Christmas money from the holly trees in their own woods. To these boys and girls I want to say "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg." A tree with fine berries on it this year will, if treated right, produce a good crop again in a few years. Pruning is good for a tree, but brutally hacking its head out destroys the tree's future, and the boy who does it is not a good citizen.
Holly wood is close grained, light, and tough and is valuable in some forms of cabinet work. Here is an industry that might be developed as a side issue in the holly trade.
The best market calls for holly wreaths. I have a picture of a girl of fourteen who can make sixty wreaths in a day and she gets six and a half cents for each. That is good wages for a girl of her age, but she must get pretty tired making wreaths every minute all day long. If she could help her brothers gather the holly for part of the time, it would be easier on her back. The wreaths are made on frames of twigs, twisted into circles, and tied. Young twigs of any flexible shrub are used. Somebody has to gather these. It is a wonder that more holly trees are not planted in door yards. And wouldn't it be a good idea for some boys to begin a plantation of holly now so they can reap the harvest later? Holly will not go out of fashion in a great many years. But at the present rate the supply cannot last. The amount used every year is past belief. From one small railway station 150,000 wreaths! One year, several carloads were burned because the market was overstocked.
The time has come already when raising Christmas trees is necessary. They still come up like weeds in the woods where enough mature ones are left to seed the bared hillsides. The harvest begins in November and the trees are cut and sorted, roped to preserve their branches, in bundles of eight or less or singly, and stacked along the roads to await shipment. Hundreds of thousands are harvested every year. "No-Christmas-tree" clubs are being formed now to try to stop this wastefulness. We go too much to extremes. One Christmas tree used to be enough for all the grandchildren; but nowadays every one must have his own. If our children's children are to have real Christmas trees the boys of to-day must plant the seeds of the beloved balsam fir.
The man who discovers and makes popular a new kind of Christmas greens does everybody a good turn. One of the most remarkable "ten-strikes" ever made along this line was a sort of accident. A man who calls himself "Caldwell, the woodsman," describes his experience as follows: "It was several weeks before I found the evergreen that was to make the town of Evergreen, Ala., famous throughout the decorative world. Wandering through the woods one day, my attention was attracted to a beautiful green vine hanging from the topmost limb of a small dead oak. I caught hold of the vine and pulled it down, and was much astonished at the ease with which it came out of the tree, and the fact that it seemed in no way injured by my rough treatment. On carrying it to my new home, I arranged it around the mirror in my room, and, after leaving it there for about a week or ten days, found that it was as fresh and green as ever."
Mr. Caldwell saw that in wild Southern smilax he had found a plant that possessed all the good points required for wholesale decorations. It is used everywhere now. City florists cannot get enough of it. The plant is a perennial, renewing itself every year, and grows in greatest profusion in its wild habitat. He had an uphill job, though, convincing the fashionable florists of the value of this plant. But he persevered and now he ships five thousand cases of it a year at an average profit of one dollar per case.
Young long-leaf pines grow in the South and are now used extensively for Christmas decoration in the North. It seems a pity to kill a pine tree every time one of these is cut, but in places where the seedlings come up too thick for good forest growth cutting out some is a benefit. If only the gatherers would be conservers as well!
The collecting of ferns in the woods is a business suited to the country boys and girls. This has grown to a really great enterprise since the rage for country things has struck city people. There is some sham about every fad of this kind, but the fern gatherers are not shamming. They do the real work. To succeed in this, one must not work haphazard. He must know just what his customer wants, and the buyer must know just what the collector can supply. Ferns is a big group of plants, and some of them you couldn't sell. If Christmas ferns grow plentifully in your woods, you can gather them by the thousand fronds. But will the florist buy those leaves which have the brown spots (or spores) on the under side? Find out before you waste your time. Those spores are more valuable in the woods than on the garbage heap. The boys who pull the plants up by the roots are killing their own goose. The fern can spare all the perfect leaves you find on it in the fall without much if any damage. A new crop will be forthcoming next year if the roots are undisturbed. Scissors and care used in gathering only good leaves will pay now, as well as in the future.
There are a number of wild things that deserve more popularity. Bitter-sweet is lovely and lasts forever, nearly. You seldom see it in the market, though. Sumach too, has great decorative value, yet whoever saw it in a florist's window? Cattails, pussy willows, spice bush, dogwood flowers and berries, Solomon's seal, and a score of other wild flowers are already in use. But there are others you may be able to introduce to city people. It is surprising what they will buy and admire if it comes from the country. I rode on a suburban car one day behind an armful of poison ivy. It was brilliantly beautiful and I suspect the gatherer wished I had kept still when I told her what it was. If she hadn't had a child with her, I should have let her risk it. Maybe she was immune. Most people are. The funniest thing I ever saw for sale was a basket of skunk-cabbage flowers on Broadway. The shrewd old farmer who had them for sale got a quarter for two. He called them Japanese lilies.
I wonder that the winter berry has not found more favour for decoration. Two kinds of shrubs with this name are common in our Northern woods. They are both hollies, but, unlike the Southern holly, lose their leaves. One has bright orange-coloured berries, the other is covered with a great profusion of bright scarlet fruits. Nothing could be more effective in a large vase in a dark corner. They light up handsomely at night or in the sunlight.