How to Help Your Garden (or Even Some Fish) With Your Dried-Out Christmas Tree

As the new year begins, most people are finally getting a minute to clear out the chaos left behind by the holiday season—from wrapping paper remnants to festive dinner leftovers. 

But what about the giant Christmas trees lingering in living rooms? Though artificial trees now dominate the holiday market, around one in every four households that display Christmas trees choose live ones. 

While you can’t stow away these evergreens to use next year, Christmas trees can take on a new life after the holiday season is over. Experts recommend a number of ways to recycle the plant to support your garden, animal sanctuaries and even fish. 

As people find ways to dispose of their Christmas trees, farmers are already thinking about next year’s crop. Fraser firs—the most popular Christmas tree species in the U.S.—require specific growing conditions and can take up to 10 years to mature, so tending to these iconic conifers is a year-round job. But like most other crops around the world, Christmas trees are vulnerable to changing conditions brought by climate change—and many farmers are already feeling the sting. 

Wreaths to Reefs: Dried out and browning Christmas trees can often be seen littering city and suburban streets for weeks—or even months—after the holiday season. But there are plenty of other, more sustainable ways to recycle the fragrant firs that once stood proud indoors, experts say.  

For example, the trees can provide crucial habitats for freshwater fish. Each year, wildlife agency officials and conservation groups collect Christmas trees to submerge in lakes across the country. Small native fish often congregate in these artificial forests-turned-reefs, hiding and mating within the thick needle masses. 

These underwater nurseries attract bigger game fish predators, supporting the food chain and providing bigger catches for local fishers, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which recently put out a call for tree donations after Christmas to dump in Georgia lakes (but don’t forget to remove your decorations first). Similar drives are happening in states across the country. 

On land, some animal sanctuaries accept Christmas trees to feed goats and pigs or to provide habitat for smaller critters like birds. But the trees can also bolster your own backyard. People can cut branches from the tree to protect plants in a garden or insulate the soil so it doesn’t overheat during warm winter spells, botanists say. Some areas organize drives where you can drop off trees at wood chippers that ground them up into mulch or compost, such as New York City’s annual Mulchfest on Jan. 11 and 12. 

“Real trees, in the end, are recyclable [and] completely biodegradable,” Justin Whitehill, a forestry researcher at North Carolina State University who studies Christmas trees, told me. 

Some people have taken a more creative approach to recycling their Christmas trees—from creating rustic coasters to collecting pines for a fragrant cleaning spray, Outside Magazine reports. In any case, removing the tree from your home is crucial because it can become a fire hazard as the needles and branches dry out. 

Climate Change and Christmas Trees: Oregon reigns supreme as the top-producing state for Christmas trees in the country, providing 33 percent of the crop for the U.S. But North Carolina is a close second, producing around 4 million trees annually. 

It’s been a tough holiday season for many people and farmers in the western region of the state, which is still recovering from the catastrophic damage from Hurricane Helene in September. 

Most Christmas trees in this area of North Carolina are grown at high elevations on the side of mountains, so many were spared from storm-related flooding. But not every farm avoided the destruction, The Washington Post reports. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, thousands of Christmas trees were lost due to landslides during Helene and other hurricane-related events, and the storm caused “approximately $125 million in losses of ornamental nurseries and Christmas trees.” 

Other acute climate-fueled weather events have decimated Christmas tree crop yields in the past, including a persistent heat wave and drought that hit Oregon in 2021 and killed more than 70 percent of the Christmas tree seedlings that were planted that year. But Whitehill is primarily concerned about the long-term and indirect climate impacts for these holiday conifers. 

“When we grow Christmas trees, we typically are taking them out of their natural habitat, particularly with Fraser fir,” Whitehill said. “Taking them out of their sort of natural range, we’re already putting a lot of stress on them.”

He added: “As [the] climate changes and accelerates, we’re getting more stress put on the trees.” 

Warmer winters and longer growing seasons are leading to a surge of pest outbreaks that can affect Christmas trees, research shows. In North Carolina, fungus-like Phytophthora organisms are spreading through conifer populations and causing often fatal cases of root rot. This disease has been an issue for Christmas tree farmers for decades, but climate change is weakening the trees’ ability to fight off infection, Whitehill said. 

“That’s where our job comes in … to help get those trees adapted more quickly to continue to thrive where they’ve been growing historically,” he said.

Whitehill leads a lab at NC State that is using genetics to breed Fraser fir trees that can better withstand climate-related threats. The team and partners from other organizations recently received a $7.5 million federal grant to aid their efforts as they attempt to breed a new generation of climate-tolerant Christmas trees. 

2024 Top Climate News

In this special holiday edition, I figured we could do things a little differently and look back at “past climate news” from 2024 since it was such a big year for the climate—and holds clues for what’s ahead. 

In March, I covered a seemingly counterintuitive practice that has been picking up steam among banks and consumer businesses, in which companies intentionally don’t publicize their climate-friendly actions and goals. Dubbed “greenhushing,” this trend largely arose following backlash against some companies when they publicly stated their climate or environmental goals and subsequently failed to reach them. At the same time, right-wing politicians and thought leaders hammered eco-campaigns and business decisions made with climate change in mind. To avoid criticism from both sides, some companies have simply stopped sharing their sustainability pledges with consumers. But this can make climate progress harder to track, experts say. 

Meanwhile, climate change curriculums have permeated syllabi across all levels of the education system. In May, I covered the student-led push for more classes that discuss climate science, policy and more. This comes as schools themselves are bombarded by extreme weather and heat, which can inhibit brain function. Similar student initiatives are happening in medical schools as new doctors learn how to treat humanity’s era of climate-fueled illnesses. I reported on one of these climate curriculum programs that was launched at Harvard Medical School, where the majority of student participants agreed that the program was valuable and improved their understanding of the health impacts of climate change, according to a recent study. But a newsletter I wrote in September detailed how many universities have close ties with the industry most responsible for climate-warming emissions. A growing body of research shows that oil and gas companies often help fund climate research on campuses, which could pose conflicts of interest. 

Last year was also marked by a number of record-breaking extreme weather events. In September and October, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton slammed communities in the southeastern U.S. After Helene hit, I connected with hurricane researcher Craig Colten, who spoke about the rising threat of inland flooding as climate change accelerates. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, a hard-hit area still picking up the pieces following the storm. 

But climate change can also cause more subtle and long-term impacts. For example, in October, I wrote about how rising temperatures may be altering nature’s hues, from fall leaves to ocean blues. Rising temperatures are also pushing animals closer to humans, which could increase human-wildlife conflict and risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks. 

Another big bit of news from 2024 that has implications for the climate: Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. People across the country who understand that climate change is an ever-present threat faced anxiety in the wake of the election, so I spoke with several therapists who shared strategies for coping with this feeling, such as taking space to process and participating in climate action. In November, Trump tapped several people for high-ranking staff positions to join his administration. They each have a role to play in U.S. climate policy—and for helping carry out Trump’s stated goal to “drill, baby, drill.” You can read about his choices here. 

Thanks so much for following along with “Today’s Climate” in 2024. I can’t wait to keep bringing you the latest environmental news in the year ahead.