The delicate seedlings in Shawn Streaker Lane's expansive back yard look fine until you walk among them.

Half of the 2,000 trees she planted in the spring are dead, skeletons standing upright in the soil.

It was a trying year to try Christmas tree farming - to grow anything, really, in such dry conditions - but Lane's operation is less about agriculture than about saving her 8-acre homestead in Ellicott City, owned by her family since 1874.

Even half-gone, the trees serve an important purpose: lowering her $7,000-a-year property taxes so she will not feel forced to sell as others in Howard County have, the oft-forgotten result of spiraling land values.

The problem is that Lane, 52, is emotionally invested in the seedlings now. They're not simply a tax break.

"I can't help it," she said, walking along a row pockmarked by signs of the drought. "I didn't do this to have a field of dead trees. ... I was raised, when you put something in the ground, you do everything you can to make it grow."

Her father - the "piece of work" who fished with dynamite once and helped her build her house from the foundation up - taught her that. In July, the cancer in his body overcame him. Then her 78-year-old aunt passed away suddenly last month, also from cancer. Both had lived alongside Lane for years; now only her son and her mother are left with her on the land.

It seems as though everything around her is dying.

"I feel very fragile," she said softly.

And yet at her core Lane is anything but.

When her property assessment suddenly spiked to more than a half-million dollars last year, she spent months figuring out how to lower it without moving, without selling pieces to developers and without preserving the land forever from development, which would limit her retirement options. Now, because the land is used for agriculture, it is assessed at $189,470 and taxes are about $2,500 a year.

Lane planted the pines, firs and spruces during one of the worst droughts in Maryland's history, and it shows.

She walked between the rows recently and pointed out the victims - so many that she stopped digging them out. Many are brown where they ought to be green. Others are one-sided trees; she has no idea why.

The "little things look kind of sad," she said, pausing over a dry stick that was once a plant.

That first year is tough, especially if the weather does not cooperate, agreed Danny Blicken- staff, vice president of the Maryland Christmas Tree Association, to which about 100 growers belong.

An industry rule of thumb is that at least eight out of 10 trees ought to survive, but he knows people who have lost more than Lane.

He includes himself on that list. Of the several thousand Southwestern white pine trees he planted at his Mount Hope Farms near Hagerstown a few years ago, a dozen remain.

Blickenstaff said his other trees have done well because he plants them twice - first in a nursery bed, well-watered, and later in the field.

"Then they're real hardy and they can pretty much withstand droughts," he said.

Lane joined the Christmas tree association for advice like that and is still excited about the possibilities of a business on the side. Seedlings are a few dimes apiece, so she plans to replace 500 of the dead trees in the spring, plant another 500 next fall and try again.

It'll be about eight years before anything is ready to cut, but her colleagues at Baltimore City Community College have already promised to buy.