Someone in the Seattle area is probably thinking his Christmas tree is mighty fine, a one-of-a-kind conifer just made for ornaments, tinsel and twinkling lights.
XMAS FAIL.
Instead, the 7-foot tree,
cut down in Seattle's Washington Park Arboretum earlier this week, was a rare, imperiled, maybe irreplaceable specimen from China valued at $10,400.
The Seattle Times reports this:
"It makes me want to cry," said Randall Hitchin, manager of living collections for the University of Washington Botanical Gardens, which include the arboretum.
Hitchin nurtured the Keteleeria evelyniana from the time it arrived as a seedling in 1998.
The park has one other specimen, collected from a different area. But that tree is a kind of ugly duckling, compared to the symmetrical beauty that was felled, Hitchin said.
Read more
-- and
please
, don't chop down any of the beauties at Portland's
(which happens to have a related conifer, the
).
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