BROOKLINE – Not all that many years ago, when Brookline had a population of about 1,000 people, the main home occupation of many of the residents was making Christmas wreaths and decorative roping. They used the native mountain laurel and princess pine, and brought the fragrant balsam boughs from Vermont.

Now, with five times as many residents, the hillsides are covered with houses and there is little local laurel for the picking.

Ralph and Sandra Bent, now in their mid-70s, are among the last of those wreath makers. He was forced to retire six years ago because of a heart attack.

“I did it all my life,” Ralph Bent said, taking a break from getting his yard ready for winter. “So did my father and my grandfather before him.”

While for most residents it was a seasonal occupation, “getting some extra money for Christmas,” Sandra Bent said, for Ralph it was year-round business, supplying a variety of flower shops, including Collins Flowers in Nashua, with the greenery for flower arrangements. He also had a “flower route,” he said, picking up the flowers in the Boston markets and selling them in the Laconia and Franklin areas.

The making of decorations began in October, Sandra said, when they gathered princess pine to weave and wind into ropes.

“That was easy to work with, soft, no prickles like cutting the laurel, and it was long-lasting,” she said.

Princess pine is a large, evergreen club moss which resembles a miniature pine tree, It is also known as ground pine and was a favorite of decorative rope makers, but now much of its local habitat is also gone.

“We used to go out and get it,” Sandra said. “Ralph’s grandmother could out pick us all.”

“We did yards and yards of roping,” She said, and then they did the wreaths, made from laurel and balsam, but also some from cedar or white pine.

The town shipped hundreds of wreaths to the Boston markets, she said.

Most of the mountain laurel was picked locally.

“Laurel grows only as far north as Manchester,” Ralph said. “There was a lot of it in Brookline and Mason and Milford, and out in western Massachusetts. But with the houses, there is little place left around here to pick it.”

Balsam is also regional, he said, and grows naturally to the north.

Sandra added, “People who have it don’t seem to realize that picking it was good for the laurel, it is like pruning it if you do it right.” The shrubs were kept lower and bushier and it is a very hardy plant.

One of Ralph’s favorite parts of the work, and he said he had no favorites, was the trips to northern Vermont for the balsam and cedar boughs.

“When I was young, I went with my grandfather, and my grandmother would cut it,” he said, putting the branches into bundles.

He has been making wreaths, he said, “almost from the time I could walk. I was about the last one (in Brookline) to quit.”

“I never actually liked making roping,” he said. “I grew up with it, since I was about 12.” One does get tired of doing some things.

Almost all of the decorations used locally were made locally, Ralph said.

“People in many of the towns made them, but it was a big thing in Brookline,” he said.

“You couldn’t go to a Walmart or a Home Depot back then,” Sandra added. “It was all local.”

Then Maine and Canada workers got into the market, Ralph said.

“They began bringing in big trailer loads, and it was much cheaper than ours,” he said.

Sandra said, as an aside, “and much cheaper made, too, not like ours. Branches sticking out”

Through the 1950s, into the 1960s, Ralph said, “Towns used to decorate the main streets for Christmas, looping the ropes across the streets between light poles. Milford, Wilton, even Nashua. Then they all went to artificial.”

Plastic is cheaper, he agreed, and it can be stored for reuse, but it isn’t the same.

Bent’s father made to order some of the huge fresh wreaths that local companies once used to decorate their buildings, he said.

He recalled one made for Hitchner’s in Milford, “so big you could almost walk through it.”

It hung on the front of the main building.

“All of that gradually went out,” he said.

Bent has lived on Meetinghouse Hill Road in Brookline all of his life. His home is next door to one where he grew up. He and Sandra have been married for 57 years, she said. They met during one of Ralph’s excursions to northern Vermont for balsam boughs.

There are still a few wreath makers in town, he said, people who make the decorations sold by the Boy Scouts and the Historical Society, but back then, Sandra said, “It was a town thing. Everybody was making wreaths.”