Beer no solution for Xmas tree life

Needle drop? Now try beer and hairspray

IT'S almost Christmas and as the festive season starts, thousands of New Zealand families will be bringing home their Christmas trees to decorate.

There is something special about the smell of a real Christmas tree.

That special thing is a chemical called beta-pinene, part of a class of hydrocarbons known as terpenes which give off a fresh, woody fragrance.

As beautiful as a real Christmas tree can be, the constant dropping of needles on the floor can make owning one seem like a lot of work. However, thanks to some very dedicated tree researchers, it looks like science might have a solution.

A study published in the Australian Journal of Botany tested four treatments as potential solutions for the Christmas tree needle-drop problem.

They took several trees and made sure they had access to plenty of water at the base and stored them for a month at room temperature.

Over the month, they exposed some of the trees to different fluids and monitored needle health using a chlorophyll fluorescence meter which relates to how healthy and green the tree looks.

The first solution they fed to the tree was an energy drink. Research has shown that cut flowers last longer in sugar solution than in pure water, so the scientists wanted to see if feeding the tree a sugar-laden energy drink could help it to keep its needles.

The second treatment involved pouring boiling hot water on to the base of the tree. The theory was that the hot water would dissolve the sap at the cut part of the tree which could help increase the tree's water uptake over time.

The third treatment fed a diluted beer solution to the tree. Mixed with 50 per cent water this solution contained sugar, nutrients and minerals, and the researchers wondered if they might be the nutrients the tree needed (spoiler alert - they weren't).

The final treatment was to spray the tree with hairspray. As odd as it may sound, cut trees lose a lot of water and the theory was that the hairspray could potentially help prevent evaporation from the needles.

The results showed that beer and energy drinks did not help the tree to last longer.

NZME