My family’s first Christmas tree in the Adirondacks was a hemlock. I know this for a fact because my father wrote about it in one of his first essays as a country editor, something he became when he and my mother moved us from Manhattan to Lewis, New York in 1956.
In his essay, he quotes a favorite author, John Burroughs, who remarked somewhere that “the hemlock is a clean, healthy, handsome tree” and a new neighbor, a tree farmer who told him that “trees seem to do better where there are people around.”
My father saw the grove of evergreens that shielded the house against the west winds blowing from Essex County’s Plains of Abraham (which, he had just learned from a 1941 government report, has the shortest growing season in New York State) as part of a symbiotic relationship with our family: if we would maintain the trees, the trees would support us.
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