A Second Career in Christmas Trees

By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, December 3, 2006

The cut-your-own Christmas tree has been with us since time immemorial, but before the 1960s it was the isolated evergreen in a wood owned by someone you knew, or maybe didn't know. Property boundaries of mountain forestland were often vague.

But as the historically stable Loudoun County population of 21,000 nearly doubled with refugees from city and suburb in the 1960s, no-trespassing signs grew in number. And a few people realized that there was a market to tap by planting acres of evergreens.

One of the first half-dozen Christmas tree farmers in Loudoun was Marian Czarnecki, who had grown up on a large cattle and wheat farm near Poznan, Poland. His family emigrated when the Germans occupied the area after they invaded Poland in 1939.

Czarnecki was a Georgetown University graduate student when he and his wife, Joan, choosing the "mountains rather than the seashore," as he put it in a recent interview, settled near Bluemont in 1954.

Over the next 25 years, he rose from student to chief of staff of what then was called the House Foreign Affairs Committee and adviser to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Nearing retirement, Czarnecki decided upon a second career and purchased 25 Hogback Mountain acres north of Oatlands. "Why would you want to buy that?" his wife asked when she first saw the dilapidated spread. "Why, the oaks alone are worth it," Czarnecki replied. The farm became known as Oaksworth.

He sought advice from Bill Harrison, Loudoun's agricultural extension agent, on soils and types of farming to try and from county forester Dana Malone on what to plant and where to plant it. He didn't want to raise cattle. "Everybody was doing that," he told me.

Harrison initially recommended breeding thoroughbred horses, Czarnecki recalled, but "I didn't have a million dollars."

He tried pumpkins one season. He planted 5,000. "The bees refused to work [pollinate], and there was too much rain. I harvested eight."

So he settled on three tree crops that needed a minimum outlay of cash: a peach and apple orchard -- he named the apples "Virginia Specials" -- a vineyard of cabernet, chardonnay and Riesling grapes, and 10,000 evergreen seedlings on 15 acres. In about seven years, he could expect a return on his investment that would coincide with his retirement in 1987.

In farming terminology, these ventures are called "alternative agriculture," as they are not standard practice such as growing grain or raising cattle. He remembered one of the county's prominent farmers calling him and others like him "carpetbaggers" -- a nickname for Northerners who came to the South for political or economic gain after the Civil War.

Czarnecki's pluck caught the eye of George Barton, then chairman of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, and Barton asked him to join Loudoun's Agricultural Advisory Committee. He soon became its chairman. A main task of the committee was to recommend enterprises to people who wanted to farm a nominal number of acres.

Czarnecki tried several varieties of evergreens, including Scotch pine and Frazier fir, the latter a dense, dark green and tender-needled conifer -- "the one tree I never had any luck with." With their soft needles and heavy growth, white pines became the big seller.

White-pine needles were also a favorite food of deer, so he kept a couple of part-collies on the property to chase the marauders, which increased as more of the eastern county became developed and the deer moved west.

Careful trimming is the key to selling a tree, Czarnecki said. "Evergreens should be sheared in the summer, when their growth is slowest." The trimming begins when the trees are about 3 feet high and four years old.

"You cut branches that are sticking out so the tree becomes a nice triangle. When the tree is five or six feet high, it might grow 6 to 12 inches a year. So you cut part of the new growth that tends to pull the branch down and create a space above the branch," he said.

Oaksworth was open four days a year for tree sales, usually the first two weekends in December. "We usually sold about 1,000 trees, and the average price was $20," which included cutting and binding the tree aboard a vehicle. "People would stay for hours. If it was a nice day, they'd spread a blanket and have a picnic or throw a football or Frisbee. I found out it took an average of four hours for people to agree to buy one tree."

Seven-foot trees were the favorite height, but "by the end of the '90s, when the McMansions started going up, people started looking for 12- to 15-foot trees," he said. "We sold them for $100. They carted them away in horse vans."

Large trees that didn't sell were cut to leave a seven-foot top. The bottom half was cut up for firewood, and the greenery was sold for wreaths.

When Czarnecki saw that some families were holding hands, dancing around a tree and singing songs before they bought it, he asked them why. "They were Scandinavians or Germans -- 'Just like we used to do in the old country,' " he recalled them saying.

Oaksworth kept records on who came and what kind of trees they bought. A repeat customer received a free evergreen every fifth year. "We advertised for a few years, but afterwards people just came coming back," Czarnecki told me.

In the early spring, beside the stumps of the downed trees, Czarnecki planted one- or two-year-old fertilized shoots, previously kept in pots. The stump-and-root system of the cut trees decayed quickly and fed nutrients to the new trees.

Loudoun now has 19 Christmas tree farms, but Oaksworth is no longer among them. Czarnecki retired from farming in spring 2005 and sold the property. He told me that the quarter-century he spent there had been one of "hard work, learning something new every week, and outliving most of my friends."

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker in Waterford.