David Van Middlesworth’s 10-year-old daughter, Kathie, has the same Christmas tree this year that she had last year, only 6 inches taller.

“I like it better than killing a tree,” the Pacific Palisades father said of the potted Aleppo pine that he rents. “It smells better, it’s safer and the fact that somebody comes and takes it away at the end of the holiday is a major benefit.”

The evergreen came from the Living Christmas Co., a Redondo Beach startup with a mission. Its purpose: “Change the way California celebrates Christmas,” said Scott Martin, 30, the company’s founder who calls himself “Scotty Claus.”

More specifically, he leases out living Christmas trees that will survive to see another holiday as part of a $2.1 billion industry that, affected by customers’ desire for convenience and the green movement, has recently tended toward artificial trees.

Competitors and others in the nursery business say the new company has an uphill climb. Potted Christmas trees, they say, are difficult to keep alive inside a house.

So far, though, Living Christmas – now observing its second season in business – seems to be doing OK.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Alison Crowley, a 45-year-old yoga therapist who recently got a new tree delivered to her Pacific Palisades home. “It’s nice to have something that you don’t have to drag out dead at the end of the season, leaving needles all over the house.”

Martin keeps the trees – about 7,500 of them – on two otherwise vacant acres at nurseries in Torrance and Gardena. For fees ranging from $50 to $185 – about 20 percent to 25 percent higher than comparable cut tress – the company will deliver potted trees to homes in the South Bay or Westside in rented trucks. Then, three weeks later, one of the company’s 17 part-time employees will pick up the tree and return it to the lot for reuse next year.

And therein lies the rub, said Oliver Holt, proprietor of Oliver Holt Sons & Daughters Christmas Trees, which sells cut trees at five Los Angeles County lots.

“The problem is that they don’t like it inside,” said Holt, who used to provide potted trees but stopped. “People over- or underwater them, put them over heating vents or too close to windows. That’s why I’m not a fan of live trees in the house.”

The cut trees he sells, according to Holt, are grown specifically for that purpose and afterwards are ground into weed-abating mulch.

“It’s novel and some people will like the idea,” he said of Living Christmas’ reusable trees. “But it’s not going to catch on.”

Gary Jones, director of marketing for Glendora-based Armstrong Garden Centers Inc., which operates 33 nurseries in California, takes a somewhat more optimistic, though also cautious, view.

“I think the concept is great,” he said. “But I wonder if people are as motivated to care for a tree knowing that it’s going to be picked up. A tree that’s been inside a house will probably go dry and get stressed.”

Martin acknowledges that 10 percent of the trees he rented out last year died, and he expects that kind of loss every year. The trees that survive the Christmas season, he said, are eased back into nature gently: They’re kept in a covered area for a month before being exposed to direct sun again.

In 2008, the company’s first year in business, Martin delivered 120 trees. This holiday season, he expects to deliver at least 500 more.

“We are opening up a whole new segment; people who won’t buy a cut tree and won’t buy an artificial tree because they don’t believe in it,” said Martin. “What we have here, basically, is a mobile forest.”

That forest consists of Aleppo and Monterey pines as well as cypress, sequoia and cedar trees ranging from 2 to 8 feet high.

The average potted tree, Martin said, lives seven or eight years in its container, meaning that it can be reused nearly that many Christmases. After that, he said, each tree will be planted in the ground. Though he may use some of the trees in his landscaping business, most will be donated to groups specializing in planting trees in urban areas or reforesting more remote areas.

At a customer’s request, a particular tree can be tagged with an identifying barcode, allowing a family to get it year after year.

“Last year, our tree actually grew an inch at my house,” said Damira Bacic, 55, of Manhattan Beach. “And this year it’s already gone through two gallons of water.”

Martin said the concept grew out of a vision he had while delivering Christmas trees during winter breaks as a teen.

“It was absolutely the most fun you could have,” he said. “But it struck me that, at the end of the season, they lay broken at the curb. There was a disconnection between the joy and hope that a live tree symbolizes for Christmas and something so easily discarded when the holidays are done.”

He went on to become a successful landscape designer, founding and operating his own company, Martin Design Associates. But the idea of starting a live tree-leasing service gradually took hold.

Last year, drawing about $100,000 from a line of credit, Martin started the company with thousands of potted trees purchased from a grower going out of business. This season, he expects to generate about $50,000 in revenue, and next year he hopes to break even. By 2012, he hopes to be netting at least $165,000 a year.

The next step, he said, will be selling franchises to broaden the company’s geographic reach.

Martin said that the way to change consumers’ behavior – such as getting them to reuse live trees – is for businesses to figure out how to profit from that behavior.

“If you can’t make money,” he said, “then nothing will change.”