A crane lifts this year’s holiday tree from the flatbed truck as workers from the City of Portland, Keeley Crane and Shaw Brothers prepare to set the tree into position in Monument Square. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

How many lights does it take to adorn a 40-foot blue spruce tree?

Mark Reiland, the city arborist since 2023, said the towering tree in Portland’s Monument Square will be decked in about 4,200 individual bulbs this year. Here are his answers to five other questions about how the city picks its tree every year.

This interview has been edited for length.

City arborist Mark Reiland inspects an ash tree near the intersection of Spring and High streets in Portland in June. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

What is the process for choosing a tree for Monument Square?

So traditionally, we put out a request for nominations. That’s coordinated between us here and the parks department and Portland Downtown and the mayor’s office. We put out a request for private citizens to nominate conifer trees on their property that they would be willing to donate to the city for the holiday tree. That usually goes out late September, and the nominations just start rolling in. This year, we had about 10 trees overall that would have qualified for being the holiday tree.

People come from all around southern Maine to see the tree lighting and participate in the festivities, so we get nominations from all towns, all around southern Maine. But this past year, we really decided that we wanted to keep it within Portland, to choose a tree within Portland for a couple reasons. For one, the transportation of an entire tree whole is surprisingly challenging. It really gets complicated once we get more than a few miles away from Monument Square because we have to navigate an 18-wheeler with all sorts of tie-downs and the tree hanging out.

So out of the 10 viable nominations this year, four of them were from Portland.

How did this tree get picked from those submissions?

Aesthetics play a big part of it. So that would include the tree height. When the tree is standing before we harvest it, the finished height in Monument Square is about 10 feet shorter than it is where it’s growing. So there’s a minimum height requirement. We like to have a fairly good-size tree in there.

We try to be ecologically sensitive, to not unnecessarily harvest a large, mature tree. Out of the four nominations, this one in particular because of where it was going was causing some conflict and issue. It was in a really tight spot between two buildings. Regardless of whether we harvested it for the holiday tree, it was going to be cut down anyway. That was a pretty strong deciding factor. At least this way we get some additional uses and benefits out of it.

How do you secure the tree?

The current anchoring system is definitely arrived at through trial and error. The tree itself actually sits down about four to five feet into the square itself. There’s a manhole cover and a concrete hollow pipe that the tree sits down into, and then we use tons and tons of wooden shims.

We also have four steel guy wires that go to various locations on the building facades right on Monument Square. One is temporarily anchored for the holiday season to the base of the monument itself. One goes over Congress Street and is mounted to a building façade on the other side of the street. We have it anchored in four directions as well as sunk down into the square by quite a few feet. That gives us pretty good resistance to wind throw, which is the main issue in that location.

I’ve seen some chatter that the tree is maybe sparser than usual this year. You said the aesthetic of the tree matters. What did you like about this particular tree and its look that led you to choose it?

We definitely want a tree that will stand tall enough. The lighting ceremony is absolutely packed, so if we had a smaller, 15 or 20 foot tree in there, it would be less of a spectacle. We look for taller.

The aesthetic aspect of it is one small part of the calculus. We’re really trying to build up the green infrastructure and build upon it in the city. So one of the main deciding factors this year was that by selecting a tree that was going to be removed anyway, we limited, in a global sense, that we’re only losing one mature tree now versus potentially two. So that was a pretty big deciding factor.

With that, it’s given the forestry crew a little more artistic license to do some different things with the lighting this year to mimic some of the other lighting that we’ve done around the downtown area. With a thicker canopy, it’s not usually very feasible for us to be able to wrap the entire truck of the tree to the tip, as well as the more traditional holiday tree peripheral canopy lighting. This year we’ll be able to do a pretty healthy combination of both.

Do you put a tree up in your own home during the holidays, and if so, do you have special criteria as an arborist?

It’s more and more important these days to make sure it is a sustainably acquired tree. I personally don’t really put one up because I don’t want to harvest one, but if you’re buying a locally grown Christmas tree from a farm that’s replanting on a cycle, at that point, that’s an agricultural product. There’s not really any issue with it ecologically other than to limit the amount of fossil fuel miles associated with the transportation. Buy local, be local, is what I would say.