Christmas Tree Threat

"We estimate that it causes direct losses every year of one and half million dollars," he explains. "Once the Phytophthora is in the soil it makes it impossible to go back and replant Fraser firs in that area."

Frampton and his colleagues from the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University are looking for ways to fight back.

Grafting Fraser seedling onto resistant roots

Frampton has shown that "grafting" Fraser fir seedlings onto the stem and roots of a resistant tree passes on some of the resistance to the Frasers. He has since begun teaching the grafting techniques to local growers.

But, even among the resistant species, some trees are more resistant than others. "We still need to do research to ensure that we can get material that is consistently resistant," he says. So now he's searching for the most resistant trees to use for grafting — based on both genetic makeup and the environment in which they grow. Something he hopes to find by studying the seeds of the Turkish and Trojan firs he recently collected in Turkey.

"We're assembling a collection of seeds with as much genetic diversity of these two species as possible… to understand how resistance to this disease varies geographically. So that we can in the future go back and reliably get resistant material of these two species," explains Frampton.

He plans to grow out trees from the seeds and inoculate them with Phytophthora cinnamomi to look at resistance among the offspring, or progeny, of those trees.

Not Just a Christmas Problem

While a threat to one of the America's top selling Christmas trees is daunting, the stakes are even higher for Frampton's home state. Growing more than 50 million Fraser firs in the mountains, North Carolina is the nation's second largest Christmas tree producer, with a $100 million industry.

Fraser firs dying from Phytophthora root rot. image:North Carolina State University

Phytophthora is believed to have originated in Southeast Asia and have arrived in the U.S. through southern seaports in the 1800's. But it only became a problem for the North Carolina Christmas tree industry in the 1960s when the industry went from using trees from natural groves to plantations.

But this has been a particularly bad year for root rot in North Carolina Fraser firs. The tough hurricane season of 2004 — seven hurricanes and tropical storms hit the state — brought heavy rains and widespread flooding. "We had a lot of flooding that spread the spores of [Phytophthora] around, so this past growing season, this summer of 2005, we've seen a lot of mortality due to Phytophthora root rot," Frampton explains.

Frampton hopes his grafting strategy could make such problems a part of the past, and allow the replanting of Fraser firs in areas currently spoiled by the fungus, preserving what some consider the Cadillac of Christmas trees.

On the other hand, he says the Turkish firs also make some good-looking Christmas trees, so we could one day be adding a bit of an international feel to the holidays.