Experts' Expert: Picking a Christmas Tree

David Murbach was manager of gardens for developer Tishman Speyer.

As such, one of his responsibilities was choosing the giant, absolutely perfect Christmas tree which goes up in New York City's Rockefeller Center every November.

He scouted the nation — by helicopter — every year in order to find the very best living tree in the country.

You might consider him an expert on Christmas trees — I sure do.

Here is what he told Hannah Kate Kinnersley for her Wall Street Journal article on the subject of choosing a tree for your home.

1) Wait until two weeks before Christmas — or even less time — before buying your tree. "Trees dry out in hot interiors," Murbach told Kinnersley. He noted that though the Rockefeller Center tree indeed goes up a month or more before Christmas, "The Rockefeller tree is outside in the cold."

2) Don't look for a perfectly shaped tree. "It can be advantageous to get a tree with a flat side," he said, because "you can put it up against a wall to save space." [I would add that you can usually negotiate a better price for a tree that's misshapen.]

3) "Mr. Murbach buys his tree from a street vendor but measures the available space before picking it out, including room for a stand and a star on top," wrote Kinnersley. She continued, "... He asks the vendor to cut the trunk into a point, rather than flat, to expose more of it and help it drink. Sometimes he uses a handsaw to cut it a second time."

An ingenious and obvious (after you've read it) idea, to increase the surface area by creating multiple exposed surfaces where before there was only one.