The Tree Story

                        It was fifteen year’s ago.  I was at a wedding in Longview, Texas.  Told one of the other guests – a         fellow from San Antonio- that I was from DeRidder. He replied: “Yes, you have the world’s largest stand of             Chinese Pistachio trees.” Said he had done some graduate work in horticulture at LSU and remembered reading about DeRidder and its pistachio trees in one of his textbooks.  That’s how the whole thing started.

            I came home and looked for the trees. George Fisher helped. Most folks don’t know that George took a master’s degree in botany before he became a dentist.  George knows his trees.

            There are two really great pistachio trees in DeRidder. One is in Mary Seale’s yard on Division Street.  The other is in Virginia Wilson’s yard on Pine Street, across from Taco Bell.  You have surely seen the one on Pine Street.  If you ever had any doubt: It’s a Chinese Pistachio (Pistache).

            Every fall when the trees turn bright orange, George and I talk about getting out the map and plotting the location of all of the pistachio trees in DeRidder.  Somehow, we never get around to it.  I think maybe we secretly fear there just aren’t many pistachio trees left.

            I asked Brownie LeRay one day just where the pistachio trees came from.  Brownie was in her nineties and I thought she might know.  “A fellow came through town selling pecan trees,” she said, “and if you bought a pecan tree, he would give you a pistachio tree.”  That was the perfect explanation, because most of the trees George and I have found are along the Pine Street corridor, and this was once mostly a pecan orchard.

            As we began to talk about having DeRidder certified as a Tree City, interest in the Chinese Pistachio took on a new life.  Susan Hamm even located the textbook for us.  It is called Plants for the South and was first published in 1953.  What it really says is this: “A large number of the pistachio trees were planted in the DeRidder, Louisiana area fifty years ago.”  That fellow from San Antonio may have exaggerated a bit, but now we have a good idea of just when this whole tree story began.

            In early January, the city bought up all of the pistachio trees in Forest Hill.  Then Howard and Frances Thorne generously donated the ones they had on hand.  After that, we found a nursery in Waco that had fifteen hundred trees.  We bought more than a hundred of those.  Of course you know this.  Many of you came by city hall and purchased a tree.  One good citizen bought ten.  We are now out of trees, but we’ll have a good supply come planting season next year.

            This could be the end of the story except for one thing.  In our enthusiasm to see these trees all over DeRidder, we decided to buy a few pistachio seeds.  Well, more than a few-15,000 to be exact.  They’re in the city hall refrigerator right beside the Veggie Dip.  They’ll be ready to plant by the first of April.  If you come by to pay your water bill in April, we’ll be happy to give you a few seeds.  There’s an old saying about trees that should inspire us all to do some planting.  “The best time to plant a tree,” the saying goes, “was fifty years ago.  The second best time is today.”