Santa Claus is coming to town next month — but he might not drop in on an unlucky garden centre which has had its entire stock of 600 Christmas trees confiscated by officials.

Aberfeldy Nurseries had three containers of fraser fir trees seized at the docks on Friday after plant protection officers found the pine needle scale pest inside the shipment.

Aberfeldy president Robert Baron told The Royal Gazette he'd lost at least $15,000 on the festive freight, as it costs $5,000 to ship each container here from North Carolina and he will also have to pay to have the trees taken to Tynes Bay and destroyed.

"It's very costly," he said. "Fortunately, I work with a good supplier and he's taking the loss on the trees. It's not so much his fault as an oversight. We do bring them in refrigerated containers to keep them fresh and when our supplier packs them in the container they'll put in a bomb of an insecticide.

"This pine needle scale were buried down in the centre of the plant. When they got wrapped in netting it just pushed the insects too deep for the insecticide to penetrate."

It is too late for the Pomander Road nursery to order in more trees but Mr. Baron said a bumper crop of poinsettias meant Christmas wasn't totally cancelled at Aberfeldy this year.

"As disappointing as it is, that's the business that we are in," he said. "The plant business is a gamble. Even though the trees should be checked and certified clear at the other end, they are not always as vigilant as here.

"Next year, they will isolate a farm for our order and we will be somewhat involved in the spraying process."

He reckoned about 11,000 Christmas trees are bought in Bermuda each winter and said the Island sometimes brings in more than it needs.

"I'm sure there's going to be enough trees out there for everybody," he said.

But not everyone is convinced. Jeff Sousa, president and founder of Sousa's Gardens in Warwick, said: "I have never seen anybody get stuck with trees. I don't want to create panic but if we have some place that was filling three containers of trees and they are out of the scenario, it does make a difference."

He said an influx of calls to his garden centre from disappointed Aberfeldy customers indicated that some people were already scrambling to get their holiday evergreen.

Mr. Sousa expects to sell a couple of thousand trees this year after paying for Government officials to travel to the States to check for insects at source.

"You know the old saying 'once bitten, twice shy'?" he said. "We had two containers confiscated from us last year. This year our trees are absolutely fantastic."

Mr. Sousa, 48, said he remembered one company in the past having 14 containers of trees confiscated. There was traffic jams and people went crazy because there was a shortage."

He added: "We have to be cognisant of the fact that if this (checking of the containers) had taken place before 1940, we wouldn't have had the cedar blight."

No one from the Department of Environmental Protection, which is responsible for checking plants when they arrive on the Island, responded to a request for comment.