SYLVATUS -- A prize-winning Southwest Virginia Christmas tree is brightening Gov. Mark Warner's last holiday season in the Governor's Mansion.

The tree from Reed Island Farm was delivered to the mansion two weeks ago.

This is the third Christmas that Reed Island, owned by Billy Cornette and his wife, Betty Vornbrock, has won the right to supply the official tree for the Governor's Mansion.

The honor comes with winning the annual competition sponsored by the Virginia Christmas Tree Growers Association to choose the state's best Christmas tree.

Cornette and Vornbrock's Carroll County operation uses three marketing strategies for selling some of the 35,000 trees growing on their hillsides above Little Reed Island Creek.

They have a choose-and-cut operation at the farm on Peacock Drive in Carroll County near its boundaries with both Pulaski and Wythe counties.

Cornette takes care of this part of the marketing. Vornbrock presides over the retail lot the farm has at the Brookside Shopping Center in Roanoke. There she sells the trees and wreaths that she makes.

Wholesale shipments east and west round out their strategy, Cornette said. He sends about 1,200 trees to Richmond each year where his customer sells them on a retail lot. He sends another 1,000 to an Indiana customer not far from Chicago.

Reed Island Farm first won the state Christmas tree competition in 1998. It won again in 2003 and now in 2005.

Cornette said he planted his first trees in 1989 and began selling them in 1995 or 1996.

He does all of the work on the tree farm except the shearing, which he leaves to a family of workers who provide this skilled service to many of the Christmas tree farms in the New River Valley.

Cornette is a member of the Virginia tree growers association board of directors, and he serves as its director of Web and Internet services.

For Reed Island's choose-and-cut customers, finding the annual family Christmas tree is often a tradition. They can search the hills for the perfect tree and return to a tent by the creek where the recorded sounds of Cornette and Vornbrock's music with their old-time band, the Reed Island Rounders, float through the air.

The couple is better known for their music-making than for their trees, Cornette said.