Is there a technical reason we can't link trees?

This is something that is annoying me. Say I want to create a rich rezable garden, or take a very laboriously built bath-house into my inventory, I can't take any of the Linden plants or trees in with it as they won't link to other objects. I see absolutely no reason for this, except perhaps that it would be weird if you made one physical, but that can be fixed either by not allowing physics (like with flexible prims) or by making only the plant's base (they all seem to have a 'base' prim) the part used for collisions in physical objects.

Also, they do not seem to be copyable in the conventional sense. My scripts complain when I try to have them rez a Linden tree, however I can copy them all over the place as I like.

Both abilities seem trivial, and there is no obvious cause for them to be blocked. Is there a good reason for this or is it something that could be easily changed later on?

Also, the inability to put scripts into a tree/plant. I see no real disadvantage to allowing a script to resize a tree, or create a particle effect on it? Obviously colour, texture, and flexible would have no effect, but scripts don't seem like a big thing either.
It's just that it's that season again where out come the 10,000 prim Christmas trees that still looking nowhere near as good as a Linden winter pine with sparkly particles would

I like how you asked this! I'm inquiring further... hope we can make a Knowledge Base article about it too, it's a good question I've heard before.

Yes, there is a technical reason why trees cannot be linked or have scripts. Trees do not have a representation in the physics engine. The script code and the link/unlink code assumes that the object is known by the physics engine so trees are necessarily lacking such features.

The solution for this would be to give trees a collidable shape, and it sounds simple enough, however it would actually be a fair amount of work and we have always had other things that have been considered more important. That said, I am currently in the middle of a long project to clean up our interface with the physics engine so that changes such as collidable trees are easier to do. I'll keep an eye out for ways to ease the path for collidable/linkable/scriptable trees. If I were successful then we might be able to change how trees work sometime next year -- not in time for this holiday season, sorry.

This Q&A has been made into a Knowledge Base article. Thanks for asking!