- Hundreds of future Christmas trees are inside this bag, and they're not just any Christmas tree.

They are the most perfect Fraser firs in the world.

And they came from these trees.

- This field represents like the most elite one-tenth of one percent of all Fraser fir anywhere in the world.

- Tracy Stewart's a result of decades of Christmas tree research at the Upper Mountain Research Station in Ashe County, North Carolina.

- We call this our clone bank.

There's six places that these trees grow naturally.

All those locations are in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

So our Christmas tree geneticist at the time, John Frampton, visited every single location where they grow naturally and selected the best of the best for Christmas trees.

He had twenty eight thousand entries in his program, narrowed that down to three hundred and five.

And this is the three hundred and five selections that came out of that research.

- Fraser fir is seen as the premier Christmas tree in the United States.

- People love Fraser fir because it smells great, has strong branches with soft needles, and it holds on to those needles for a long time after it's cut.

- Really, the number one reason that folks buy Christmas trees is because of the aroma.

It just smells like the holidays.

- North Carolina produces twenty five percent of the Christmas trees grown in the United States, which translates to up to four hundred million dollars of revenue per year.

- We're producing a million to two million trees out of Ashe County alone every year.

As Christmas trees started to become popular in western North Carolina, they needed someone to help them with genetic improvements.

- We're on the hunt for the perfect tree.

The perfect tree will have disease resistance, insect resistance, the perfect shade, the perfect aroma.

And we're on that quest.

- Collaboration between what's happening in the field and the lab is key.

As Justin and Tracy continue to steward decades of research into Christmas tree perfection.

- We're trying to integrate the field work, the breeding work, the testing with the work that's being done in the lab.

- Genetics are at the core of what researchers are looking at in the lab.

- We use genetics to look at the genome and also the transcriptome of Fraser fir and other fir species in order to look for genes that are of interest.

- Genes like the ones that control how a Fraser fir smells by deciding which aromatic compounds called terpenes it produces.

- The aroma of the Christmas trees are made up of a blend of terpenes.

- Small jars allow aromas to concentrate.

- So this is just a Fraser fir.

So you can smell the distinct aroma of the Fraser species made up of its composition of terpenes and other volatile compounds.

- Oh, that smells so good.

- Alpha pinene is a terpene.

- Let me smell the pinene by itself first.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, this is like pine sol, like a little cleaning chemical-y.

A piece of Fraser fir with an added drop of alpha pinene shows how a plant's aroma is made up of a very specific mix.

It doesn't smell bad, but there's something different for sure.

It's not as sweet or something.

There's something about the Fraser that's more balanced.

Kaylee has also studied what Christmas smells like to people across the country.

Different regions grow different types of fir trees.

I didn't realize there were this many kinds of firs.

- There are a ton.

And they look really different and they smell really different, too.

- Oh, that's so much more citrusy than the Fraser.

- Yeah.

Different terpenes that are produced in the conch color make it more citrusy to us.

But for the conch color, that was just bug spray.

- Yeah, bug spray.

Exactly.

Bug spray because researchers think that terpenes play a role in defense against pests by making plants less palatable.

- We're breeding the trees for other traits like high in-needle retention.

So we want to keep that smell.

That's the classic Christmas smell.

- Beyond aroma, the lab is focused on addressing other challenges in the industry, including increased pests and disease pressure, likely due to a changing climate and Fraser firs being grown around 2,000 feet lower in elevation than their natural habitat.

- One of the biggest threats facing Christmas tree and Fraser fir production right now in western North Carolina is continued spread of this root rotting pathogen called Phytophthora.

The Latin means plant destroyer, phyto meaning plant and thora meaning destroyer.

It's really more closely related to brown algae.

It still carries a lot of these water loving characteristics.

And so that's what makes it a very difficult organism to deal with, because, of course, with Fraser fir and plants, they need water.

But Phytophthora thrives in water.

- It's pretty obvious in here, the size, like she's all pretty good.

Yeah, this is a hot spot.

The Phytophthora, this whole area here.

- On the left side of this field at the research station, you can see an area affected by Phytophthora.

- The trees are basically indicators.

Right.

So there should be a tree here.

- Yeah, and this one's got that kind of classic rust that you would see.

- Yeah, they call them Carolina reds.

- Carolina reds.

- Yeah.

I mean, it's probably our biggest challenge.

Yeah.

In the industry.

- Phytophthora is estimated to be killing 15 to 30 percent of trees in the industry annually.

- Which is a huge economic impact on our growers.

- Since Phytophthora attacks a plant's roots, one option for growers is to graft Fraser fir trees onto rootstock of other species that have a natural resistance to the organism.

Grafting involves splicing the plant you want to grow onto another plant.

- So everything below the graft union is canane fir.

Everything above is Fraser fir.

You can see the needles are a little different between the rootstock and the topstock.

- In order to grow large quantities of resistant species like momie fir that are hard to get seeds for, Robert is exploring how to grow thousands of trees from a single seed.

- I would refer to this process as embryogenesis.

This is a process that actually takes place in nature in a seed.

So I have some examples of seeds right here.

Fraser fir seeds.

- Under a microscope, Robert can extract a tiny tree embryo from a seed.

When it's kept on a gel media with the right food and tree hormones, it can replicate itself thousands of times.

- And they're all the same.

They're copies of each other.

- So everything in this tray is genetically the same.

- Correct.

- Genetically identical.

- There's a couple of nice ones right here on the bottom.

There's a second individual.

- Robert teased apart one clump of tree embryos into several clumps on a new petri dish to continue the replication.

- And this is how we can go from two to four to eight to 16.

At some point, you want to actually get a plant out of this.

This would be about six to eight weeks later.

- It's a different color.

There's little more densely colored areas.

Each one of those is a single embryo.

- That's it.

- That could grow into a tree.

- Right.

This is about six or eight weeks later.

You can tell that that's a plant.

- Yeah, this definitely looks like a baby for a tree, which is what it is.

These are so cool.

- We're at the point of trying to figure out what's the best thing to do next.

So we've got some fairly good sized seedlings in here.

I'll call them seedlings.

You can even see some roots on the bottom when you turn them over.

Those are still in that gel media.

One option that we're looking at is actually going to what's called a grower's plug.

This would be very easy for somebody who works in the greenhouse to just slip it out and put it in soil and let it go.

- Why do this instead of just planting out seeds and seeing what grows from the seeds?

- Right now, this species of fir is very rare.

So this is an example of where we can make up some of those deficiencies for the lab.

Instead of buying a kilogram of seed, I can make a kilogram worth of plants here in the laboratory.

- By increasing availability of resistant rootstock like momie fir, the lab hopes to help growers weather phytophthora in their fields.

Back out at the research station, a seed orchard is also bringing decades of research one step closer to helping growers.

This orchard has its roots in the station's original clone bank.

- These are our seed-producing trees.

There's trees in this orchard from every location on Earth where these trees grow naturally.

We want this elite material to get in the fields all over North Carolina.

So from here, this seed will be harvested, goes to our seed processing center.

- The seed processing center is a new addition to the station, but it stands on the former site of a Burley tobacco drying barn, reflecting the agricultural history of the area and honoring the people who have spent decades working to get improved Fraser fir seeds to growers.

- These sacks are full of cones, cones and seed.

- Seed bags are tagged to reflect what tree they came from.

- There's a lot of stems.

There's a lot of cone scales.

And there's also a lot of seed.

- How many seeds are in a cone like this?

I would say a good mature cone, between two and three hundred seeds.

- Justin and Tracy are excited to see the results of decades of research get ready to finally go into the hands of growers.

- This is really the culmination of over 40 years of research through this partnership with the NCEA Department of Agriculture.

- It takes so long to improve those trees.

What good is a breeding program if the seed never gets to the field?

And this is the step here that gets all those years worth of work into practice.