trees
by mary lasher

A recent retiree, I am an older Ashevillian, but I have done what younger Ashevillians do. I have fallen in love. Twice. First, with my soul mate whom I found; and then, with trees in the great wooded area surrounding the house where we live. Wondrous trees and wildflowers live in the woods, and we are visited by birds, squirrels, raccoons, and sometimes bear. Although I have jumped through the human hoops of buying property, building a house, and fixing boundaries, I know that the woods truly belong to the trees and wildflowers which will be here long after I, my soul mate, and my house are gone. So when I say “our woods” I refer to the trees, wildflowers, and us humans.

A career workaholic before retirement, I lived in a larger city and gave little notice to trees. I thought there were only oaks and pines. But now onto six years, I have explored every inch of our steeply sloped woods, laced with two little gullies, and filled with a dazzling variety of trees and flowers. I have begun to know them by name. Ecologist friends say that our mountains have as many varieties of trees as any place in the United States, and I have read that they are right. Our woods are a microcosm.

Neighbors and other friends have helped me identify some of the trees. It began five years ago when I hauled a dinner guest, an experienced gardener, out-of-doors to tell me the name of a small tree with gorgeous broad ovate leaves, which I had fallen in love with. It was a white basswood! I’ve since met a dozen or more in our woods.

Other visitors to our woods helped educate me. Experts John and Dave corrected my reference to a particular oak: it is scarlet, not red, they said. Elizabeth identified a tiny aromatic evergreen with variegated leaves as spotted wintergreen. Jane told me to look for early-blooming bloodroot, with strong white petals. They pop out every year in late March, followed by Spring-Beauties in April.

Friend Bob is helping us build a three-foot wide trail crisscrossing the woods and bridging over the gullies. It won’t be fancy orfinished. Just right for walking,meditating, and resting on the two to three-foot rocks we find here and there in the woods. In digging, we are careful not to upset the bluets, toothwort, wild phlox, violets, Solomon’s seal, sedum, jack-in-the-pulpit and trillium. The wondrous trillium have blooms of yellow, white, pink, and deep red, called Wake Robin. A trillium that had been nestling in winter’s last little heap of leaves is a breathtakingly beautiful thing to come across in May.
Tom told me about the gorgeous purple paulownia, the brilliant oranges of Michaux’s lily and Turk’s cap lily, the coral flame azalea, and the enormous white oaks. One of them is divided at the trunk, and I am exhilarated when standing beneath that mighty 125-foot tree with its flourishing branches. White oaks, like basswoods, flame azaleas, and tulip poplars, are among the most gorgeous living things I have ever known. Looking out our kitchen window each morning, I greet the majestic tulip poplar, about 100 feet tall, in reverential awe, for surely it speaks of God. Several dozen live in our woods, immensely tall, perfectly straight, with scarcely any side branches, only a leafy crown at the very top.

Peter introduced me to locust and its durable uses, should it have to be cut down. He added that locust sprouts up from just a bit of life. It refuses to die. Ruby, in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, knew this life-affirming determination of the black locust. It seems that she and Ada wished Pangle to be remembered and they buried him under a cross made of two locust limbs. Ruby had once said, “locust had such a will to live that you could split fence posts from the wood of its trunk and they’d sometimes take root…and grow.” In our woods is a cut log of locust, with a tiny sprout emerging.
Frazier, in his careful research, laces the chapters with exquisite verbal pictures of wildlife and trees that help us visualize Western North Carolina. I sense Frazier’s descriptions as reverential, and they have deepened my love affair with trees. Inman, trudging home to Cold Mountain, came across a big chestnut tree, crawled inside the hollow trunk, and slept, “wedged tight into the heart of the chestnut.”

Our woods abound with maple, glorious reds and yellows. And the oaks—scarlet, white, black, chestnut. Here too are shagbark hickory, dogwood, pine, black locust, sassafras, sourwood, redbud, black gum, sycamore, chokecherry, beech, birch, sweet gum, and others whose names I do not yet know. Each is a beauty, distinct in height and breadth, and with leaves of varying color, shape, formation, and texture.

Trees in our mountain area are a precious resource in need of protection now. They are in danger of damage and destruction. Oriental bittersweet, like an anaconda, has wrapped around and strangled to death many trees in the woods of our neighborhood. Nature’s chestnut blight and dogwood and hemlock diseases have taken their toll, and so have man’s bulldozers and concrete.

Yet nature has enormous powers of rejuvenation, which humans have always celebrated. Even in winter, when it is too cold to venture into the woods, I observe the natural cycle from my windows and witness the faint beginnings of spring. After winter, we rejoice in early spring’s bulbs, then flowers like flame pinks in May, followed by the sweeping feathery flowers of sourwood as in a midsummer night’s dream, and autumn’s glorious Joe Pye, a tall stately wildflower whose blooms form a red cumulous cloud.

Dr. Harold Crutcher, one of our tree friends, and a master gardener, astronomer and meteorologist, calls the cycle “our annual trip around the sun.” In his yearly greeting to us in late December, he wrote that he has completed his 91st year of life on our planet, having had “a marvelous time,” and plans to make “19 more of these fantastic voyages.” He no longer works in his garden, but watches the seasons change from the bay window of his house. He says, “I know that the seasons are created in part by my spaceship’s journey around the sun, our star. Your companionship on this trip is appreciated.”

Well, it is reciprocal. His friendship is greatly appreciated in our house. He was among the first to encourage my love of trees and wildflowers, and his presence is felt in our woods. Among the many plants he has given us is a seven-foot white redbud. I had never heard of a white redbud. It is flourishing. His “little brown jugs” are struggling along, and his gifts of violets and sundrops have naturalized in profusion in our woods. He helped me fall in love.

Mary Lasher grew up in Albemarle, NC, but now lives in Asheville with her soulmate. She gardens, reads, teaches history classes in retirement programs, and travels widely. She found that Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia has many trees similar to ours in Western North Carolina.