First lady Melania Trump lit the official White House Christmas Tree last week in Washington D.C. This year’s National Christmas Tree is a 32-foot red spruce from Highland County Virginia.
Spruce trees were heavily logged throughout Appalachia in the 19th and 20th centuries. In more recent years, groups have made progress bringing them back, but several spruce forests in Tennessee and North Carolina suffered massive damage from Hurricane Helene in 2024.
“It just takes hundreds and hundreds of years for those habitats to recover,” said Marquette Crockett, with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, one of the groups working to restore red spruce.
Crockett said before European settlers came to North America and heavily logged the forests, red spruce grew throughout the northern United States, and in some pockets of central Appalachia. The trees are now slowly returning, but last fall during Hurricane Helene, Mount Mitchell in North Carolina suffered landslides.
“Because they’re landslides, that means that they also lost their soils,” Crockett said. “And so restoration of those are gonna be incredibly difficult, maybe impossible.”
And on Mount Rogers and Whitetop Mountain in Virginia, as well as Roan Mountain, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, many of the tallest and oldest trees were killed. “Trees blew over, trees broke,” Crockett described. “Trees were wrenched in half.”
Red spruce trees are vitally important to several endangered species, including the Carolina northern flying squirrel. Crockett’s group is planning volunteer events next spring, in partnership with the forest service and other organizations to help grow new seedlings. She said many of the dead trees naturally become nurse trees. They provide shelter and nutrients for the next generation.
