Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : To Cut Fire Risk, City Urges Purchase of Living Trees

Lancaster officials are encouraging residents to buy living Christmas trees, rather than the traditional cut ones, to reduce the home fire hazard.

The living trees will also provide fresh greenery for city parks after the holidays. After the holiday, city employees will pick up the trees at no charge and plant them in local parks. Residents who donate their trees to the program will be eligible for a tax deduction.

The program has been in effect for the past six years, said Mike Campbell, Lancaster’s parks supervisor, but during that time only a couple dozen Christmas trees have gone from living rooms to local parks. City officials are promoting the program this year in an attempt to get greater participation.

The biggest obstacle, Campbell said, is that the type of fir trees most people buy at Christmas won’t survive Lancaster’s harsh high-desert climate.

“It’s the hot summers here that kill them,” he said. “We range from as low as 4 degrees in the winter to as high as 116 in the summer. There are very few trees that will tolerate this wide range of climate changes.”

For example, the Monterey pine, which many retailers sell as Christmas trees, will not survive year-round in Lancaster.

Among the living Christmas trees that will thrive locally are the Eldarica pine, Italian stone pine, Aleppo pine, Mondell pine, Japanese black pine, Austrian black pine, Colorado blue spruce or Scotch pine, Campbell said.

He recommended that homeowners buy their living Christmas trees from Antelope Valley nurseries, where employees are familiar with local growing conditions.

To qualify for the city park transplanting program, the trees must be in a 15-gallon container. Several local nurseries sell such trees for $60 to $80.

Because living trees do not dry up indoors during the holiday season, they are less likely to catch fire than a cut tree, local officials say.

After the holidays, a resident can arrange to have city workers pick up a living Christmas tree by calling (805) 723-6083.

For those who buy cut trees instead, two local trash collection companies, Waste Management of Lancaster and A.V. Rubbish, will pick them up after Christmas, shred them, mix them with other green waste and turn them into a high-grade mulch that will be sold at local landfills.