Hemlocks of Carolina
The Middle East is not like anywhere else. Everything, other than the base needs and desires is different than anything we Americans grew up with. To me everything here is "flimsy". Flimsy designs, flimsy in every sense. Flimsy in a way that I don't think I can get you to understand. Honestly, a few people that I know back in Eden have expressed an accuracy to me in their comprehension of this world. Usually those people are Transplantavanians that came back to the ground they knew as home.
I call there Eden, but, I know full and well it ain't. Other than the fact Eden was abolished with the advent of sin, home is a place of turmoil, confusion and drama. It's a culture war back home, it's fought every day, it never rages, just simmers in the summer heat and glows on winter nights. At times, it appears we've had the lick, and then at others we're hanging on better than ever. It's not waged as much as outsider versus insider as much as it is the new with the old.
There's a biological war as well. The hemlocks have taken a bad bad beating. They stand like skeletons, once proud and now sad old snags. Taken down by a little insect, the Wooly Alleged. Someone here before me had a subscription to North Carolina Wildlife and I picked one up and read an article on the Hemlocks struggle. I remember leaving to Iraq, those few years ago, seeing the green of the Hemlocks and coming home to see them standing without a needle on them.
Just a few years before a beetle had killed many of the pines. Where did these damn insects come from? The orient or just somewhere they should have stayed? You stomach that sight, there's no anesthesia for that pain. You accept that it's happening and pray for an answer...Then you hear some bright fellar is trying to find one. Who is this masked man?
Counter insects have been brought in, they've sprayed the trees...And have crossed some Asian trees to try to build immunity. That last one takes a long time...
Though I'm not one to lament, this ain't the first time I have lamented on this subject and it won't be the last.
The Appalachianist
Labels: Appalachia, Chestnuts, Hemlocks Western North Carolina
posted by Hill Billy Rave | Saturday, October 08, 2011
4 Comments:
before you and I roared those mountains (although it's been a quarter century since I roamed them), there were the chestnuts... One of the things about the eastern forest is how bare things look in the winter, with an occasional evergreen breaking the monotony.
I would think that bringing in other insects to eat these insects or to add pesticides or cross them with other trees (wouldn't this then make them no longer true Hemlocks?) would just make matters worse or bring on other issues with other trees in the area. Maybe it's like the earth's temperature warming up. It's just a natural turn of events.
Murf, I don't know about the eart warming. NC just had it's earliest recorded snow fall, given it was on a high top above Asheville. But, yeah, you're kinda right, thought you'd never hear me say that, didn't you? But, it's working on the chestnuts. So, maybe it's worth it. A whole lot better than the alternative. We lose the Hemlocks, we lose water quality.
Sage, it does echo of the chestnuts. However, I beg to pardon on the eastern woods seeming bare. In Appalachia, there is the mass of laurel and Ivey. We're probably greener than most places.
I'm copying your comment about me being right and saving it. ;-)
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