The bow saw ritual

Owasso tree farm hangs on as development encroaches

The day of harvest begins with a hayride. About a dozen of us climb onto the bed of a tractor that slogs past a pond and some berry vines to a back lot where trees grow in a variety of shapes. This year’s ride was a formality, given that the bulk of the harvest occupied a field up near the road.

For a decade at least, we’ve been driving to Owasso every December, to the Owasso Christmas Tree and Berry Farm, to find the most conical Douglas fir we can for under $50. Before that, we bought them on a lot now paved in asphalt for Sprouts parking.

I do the honors of cutting my mother-in-law’s tree. It’s the only time all year I get to handle a bow saw. As I run the blade across the trunk a resin burns my eyes. Sometimes I drop onto rain-wet pine needles to perform this rite; once in a blue moon, snow. Often, the ground is so dry you wonder how anything green could emerge from it. This year, the ground is soft and muddy, like walking in brownies.

Young, friendly guys in fashionably formed baseball caps take over from there, hauling the tree away to be bagged in nylon netting. They hand you your ticket and, while your tree is being processed, you go inside and drink hot cider and paw tree ornaments. We bought one this year fashioned from a three-eighths-inch diameter cut from a Douglas Fir pruning, with the state of Oklahoma carved out of the middle so precisely you could make out the southern fringes of the Red River.

The label read, “Manufactured by Natural Wood Originals of Bellingham, Washington.”

Almost $100 later, we pull out onto 129th East Avenue to head back over the river and through the woods to eat cheeseburgers and strawberry ice cream cones.

The Douglas fir is named for Scottish botanist David Douglas, who spent a lot of time documenting the Christmas-friendly conifer. Taxonomically, it is named Pseudotsuga menziesii, in honor of Archibald Menzies, another Scot and a rival of David Douglas. Meaning, the Douglas fir is not a true fir—that is, not a member of the genus Abies—but more of a pine.

Whatever the nomenclature, the tree does not come naturally to Rogers County and is therefore imported from Oregon each holiday season, unlike the Virginia pines and Leyland cypresses that grow in tidy rows on several acres of the farm, an acreage that shrinks each season with the advent of new construction.

The encroachment comes in waves. First it was the Crafton Tull-designed campus of Tulsa Tech, which lies east of 169 but casts a stone-and-steel shadow over the evergreen idyll. The latest development is a new high school—Rejoice Christian School—the footprint of which has left tracks on Bill Jacobs’ tree farm.

“We’ve had a monumental problem with the contractor with silt, dust, dirt, trash and all that,” said Jacobs of the cleanup that took two phases to complete. “It’s a lot better now. They put up a privacy fence and landscaped it all.

“The land had been vacant ever since we’d been on it, which is 30 years. They talked about a theater from Branson, Bell’s Amusement Park looked at it, even low-income housing. I guess a school is probably better than anything.”

The thrill, of course, is in the hunt. It takes less than a minute to saw down a Christmas-sized pine tree, but the time spent locating the perfect specimen can edge towards an hour. We roam up and down the aisles balancing price with perfection.

“We have a price of $10 a foot for a perfect tree,” Jacobs said. “We put a tag on every tree, then we go back and measure height, then we go back and price them. We look at foliage density, straightness of trunk … it’s a judgment call on our part.”

Judgment day is over in a day and a half. Then there are the imports, which command a higher price but require no bow saw.

“It’s all about land use,” Jacobs said, explaining the relative affordability of the fast-growing Douglas to the eight- to 10-year maturation of the Noble and Nordmann firs. “It’s now how we price it. It’s the tree itself. The U.S. government has grading rules for trees.”

As the land around the tree farm begins to sprout brick-and-mortar, I worry about this little tradition of ours. I pine for the days when you could look across the fields and see yellow grass in thick sedges and rogue conifers that blew their seeds beyond the fences.

Owasso, a so-called City of Character, clings precariously to its agrarian past while embracing its destiny as the original bedroom community of the metro area. “Character” traits—on red-and-white signs whose colors coincide with those of the high school Rams—are posted at heavily trafficked intersections, perhaps as a reminder of these growing pains. The trait posted this month preaches Compassion: “Investing whatever is necessary to heal the hurts of others.”

For more from Mark, read his lament for Miss Jackson's.