Marketing of holiday greenery has storied past

I have a bound copy of the magazine Country Life in America that covers November 1903 to April 1904. I picked it up at an antiquarian bookseller in Durham, and it has been a continual source of amusement and insight into life in America a little more than 100 years ago.

Things have changed in most ways, but a few things have stayed the same. In 1903 the Wright Brothers took their famous flight, Ford and Buick started building cars, 8 percent of U.S. homes had a telephone, and the average life span was 47 years.

The December issue has an article, "Christmas Greens and Flowers" by Thomas McAdam, devoted to greens that were mostly gathered from the wild and sent to the city for sale. The piece opens with an exploration of the beginnings of the Christmas-tree industry with this statement: "The Christmas tree industry is scarcely thirty years old. It is natural for us to take for granted that there have always been Christmas trees, yet fifty years ago there were few in America, save in the homes of foreigners." The article goes on to describe how a group of duck hunters cruising the shores of Maine got the idea to gather the perfectly conical balsam firs lining the shores and ship them into the city for sale.

"Although the trees are bulky and rather expensive to ship, there are large profits in the business; for it is a poor acre of fir land that will not yield five thousand trees, and, allowing ten dollars per acre for labor and cartage, and fifty dollars an acre for freight; the trees do not cost two cents a piece delivered in Boston or New York. In the cities the trees bring from twenty cents to five dollars. The Maine farmer gets five to forty cents for a tree. For forty cents the dealer expects a perfectly straight, symmetrical tree fully fifteen feet in height."

Who knows where all those 15-foot trees were going?

Wild greens

There was apparently quite a trade in wild greens as well. The article states that ground pine was probably the most important. This fern relative can be found in acid woodland situations where it sometimes forms great, ground-covering masses. It resembles the needlelike leaves of a conifer but trails along the ground in long ropes, making it the perfect green for draping mantels, doorways and stair rails.

Unfortunately, it is a sensitive and soil-specific plant, and though it may be found covering areas in mass, it is considered an uncommon plant. It is believed that club mosses have a symbiotic relationship with soil fungi that determine their ability to survive and procreate. The relative rarity of theses plants was beginning to be recognized even back in 1903.

"Today Wisconsin alone produces each year some two hundred tons of ground pine," the article states, and it should be remembered this stuff weighs about one-third of what an equal size branch of hemlock or spruce would.

"Unfortunately, it is necessary to pull up the whole plant by the roots; moreover, the best quality grows in swamps and deep woods, and as pioneer countries become developed the swamps are drained and the forests are lumbered. While therefore the plant itself is not in danger of total extinction the ground pine industry may come to an end inside of fifteen or twenty years."

Before the Fraser fir dominated the trade in Christmas greens in our mountains, commerce in a small heart-shaped leaf was thriving all over the Appalachians. Galax is a perennial plant of shady streams and open rocky woods in the mountains. Its distinctly shaped leaf perched on a long petiole turns a reddish bronze beneath in the winter, accenting the deep glossy green surface.

It is a truly beautiful plant and one can readily see how it would make its way into the Christmas greens industry. McAdam wrote: "The man who introduced galax to the American people is Mr. Harlan P. Kelsey and I have been fortunate enough to secure from him his own story of the creation of an interesting and important outdoor industry. The commercial use of galax dates back only to 1890, yet today the plant is well known and used the world over; and last year no less than seventy million galax leaves were shipped from the mountains of North and South Carolina."

Kelsey describes how it was the custom in his Sunday School at First Presbyterian Church of Highlands to gather and mail greens to Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia. Remembering how well the greens were received, he decided in later years to mount an advertising campaign, as it were, by shipping samples to florist all over the country.

"Galax made its way on its own merits; and, instead of thousands being sent away, the number reached into the millions, until, the coming season, a hundred million is a safe estimate of the number that will be picked and sent out from this section, with many foreign countries, particularly Germany, using their share." He goes on to describe camps made up of "mountaineers" who go "galacking" in "any kind of vehicle from a large mountain schooner to a small sled drawn by a shaggy ox."

It is illegal to collect galax in some mountain areas now, because the trade began to impact populations of this beautiful plant. Permits are issued for galax collection in National Forest lands but recent concerns have surfaced over the sustainability of the harvest. As an internationally traded floral product, the projected demand for galax is expected to soon exceed the harvest. The Mountain Horticulture Crops Research and Extension Center in Fletcher has been experimenting with growing galax as a harvestable crop. The going is slow and the plant does not respond well to domestication.

Kelsey could not have imagined that one day limits would be imposed upon the plant's harvest as has happened recently, but, as with all things, time has caught up with the little galax plant.

■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.