White House tree to come from Pennsylvania

As you ponder whether to serve a 15-pound turkey or a 20-pounder for Thanksgiving, brothers Jay and Glenn Bustard are already preparing for Christmas - in 2022.

The Bustards are third-generation Christmas tree growers. What they plant as a seedling today takes a good seven years to mature into a respectable 7-footer.

Optimists that they are, even they couldn't imagine that a Fraser fir planted in 2001 at their farm in Lehighton, Carbon County, would sprout to a national standout. On Sept. 30, it was selected the official 2015 White House Christmas tree.

At 181/2 feet tall and 11 feet wide, the tree will be on display in the Blue Room, where, unlike the typical home, there is no forgiveness for imperfect sides. No hiding them in a corner.

"It goes in the middle of the Blue Room," said Jay Bustard, 60, of Gilbertsville, who handles the office side of Bustard's Christmas Trees, which sells about 7,000 a year. He also runs an advertising firm.

The head green thumb at Bustard's is Glenn, 52, who lives with their mother, Virginia, at the family home in Worcester, also the site of one of the family's two retail lots. He has a landscaping business, too.

The road to the First Family's residence ran through Spring Grove, Ill., where a blue-tinged, 7-foot, 11-inch Douglas fir grown in Worcester earned Bustard's Grand National Champion honors at the National Christmas Tree Association's competition in July. To get there, Bustard's won a state contest in Harrisburg in January with a Lehighton-grown Meyer spruce.

Amid a sharp decline nationwide in Christmas tree farms - 14,000 in 2012, down from 21,000 in 2002, the most recent census figures show - Bustard's operates three in Pennsylvania and one in Canada to gain access to soil types and climates needed for its dozen tree varieties.

Victory at nationals qualified Bustard's for White House consideration, with no guarantee that any of its trees would be selected. Its Fraser fir will be the 50th tree going to the White House since harvesting them from the National Christmas Tree Association's grand-champion winners began in 1966, said Rick Dungey, executive director of the trade group.

"It's the pinnacle of our industry," Dungey said.

Or, if you will, the star atop the tree. Not that this industry is all tinsel and eggnog.

"The biggest thing people don't understand about the tree business is you don't throw a seed out and nine months later you have a tree you're charging 80 bucks for," Jay Bustard said. "That's not the case."

In addition to lots of time, it involves anticipating what buyers will want in the future, and experimentation and research to improve on the offerings. Balsam firs are so 1940s. The droopy branches of Douglas firs of 20 years ago are outta here.

"The challenge is because our crop takes so long to grow and be ready for harvest . . . we're not a real fast-response industry," Dungey said.

Yet change has come several times since the brothers' great-uncle Harrison Bustard started the business in 1929 as an evolution of his fruit orchard on Bustard Road in Worcester. His nephew Roland, Jay's and Glenn's father, and their mother, took over the business in 1958. At 88, Virginia Bustard still makes ribbons for the wreaths sold along with the trees.

These days, her sons are developing a market for a tree that's not a species but a new style: Victorian fir, trimmed so branches grow unevenly, yielding a more "open" tree.

They also are participating in research on the growing viability in the United States of the Nordmann fir, an evergreen from Mediterranean seed. With stiff branches and deep green needles, "we think it's going to be the tree of the future," Jay Bustard said.

He knows that deer love it. Last winter, the region's snow- and ice-covered fields left them little to eat.

"They decided to eat our Nordmann firs," he said. Of 500 trees, deer feasted on 300 to 400, not to destruction but interrupting their growth. The gluttony's cost: nearly $40,000.

"We probably could have given them filet for less," Jay Bustard said with a laugh. "But that's part of being a farmer."

dmastrull@phillynews.com

215-854-2466@dmastrull