CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A LAND OF TREES
“Give me a land of
boughs and leaf,
A land of trees
that stand;
Where trees are
fallen there is grief;
I love no
leafless land.”
A. E. Housman
When I arrived at Shabomekaw in
1957, cattle had grazed for a number of years on a tract of pasture within its
boundaries. This treeless area comprised
about ten of the sixty acres in the retreat, and somehow it broke the spell of entering
a mystical corner of the world, otherwise surrounded by trees and
mountains. In the spring of 1961 I began to put those ten acres back into
forest.
In that year, the State of
Kentucky had offered white pine seedlings to property owners at a cost of seven
dollars per thousand. I ordered three
thousand ! Yeah, I was young and foolish: two friends and I managed to plant just about
300 on that first weekend, using planting bars.
Leon and Hobart Zornes came to my rescue with the family tractor, plowed
furrows parallel to both sides of the road, and with several other helpers
managed to stick those little seedlings into the rocky soil. There were two pine fields, each about two or
three acres in size, and I watched them grow into magnificent trees.
One of the pine fields was
harvested after I sold the place in 1977.
Fortunately, Sharmon and Todd, the current owners, have preserved the
other field and the trees are immense.
Photo by Sharmon Davidson /
A big white
pine at Shabomekaw
A year or two later I began
planting Scotch and Austrian pine seedlings in the pasture, but always kept an
acre or two mowed, nearest the creek, and because the soil was rich a beautiful
meadow was created. I tried growing
tomato plants in the meadow but critters always chewed them down. And one year, a business associate in
California sent a dozen sequoia seedlings in the hope that they might grow in
Kentucky. Those little trees survived
the first winter in the meadow but were killed off the following year.
I was more successful with a
unique planting in 1958, in the clearing, not far from the cabin. A chemist at Procter and Gamble circulated a
memo throughout the Company, and at that time I was working in the Buying department
in Cincinnati. The memo described the
discovery of an ancient redwood in China, thought to be extinct. This was the metasequoia that became known as
the Dawn Redwood. The first plants had
been grown from seed out on the Pacific coast and a few were available.
Of course I ordered a
seedling. It cost ten dollars and was
not more than ten inches tall.
Instructions were included and I was told to dig a hole three feet in
diameter and three feet deep, to fill the hole with good soil and peat, and to keep
it watered for the first year. I believe
that this little redwood was the first one ever grown in the state of Kentucky,
and it lives today in the clearing at Shabomekaw.
Photo by Sharmon
Davidson / The Dawn Redwood at Shabomekaw
The tree is called a “living
fossil” because proof of its existence has been found dating back millions of
years. It is a deciduous tree, with
fern-like foliage. This photo was taken
at Shabomekaw almost 40 years ago (and yes, a tree frog happened to be sitting
on one of the tree’s branches):
Photo by Bob Wilson / circa 1975
Kinniconick country is truly a
land of trees. A great variety of tree species may be found there, and I
will tell you about some of my favorites.
Hemlock and beech always come to mind when I remember Shabomekaw. The wonderful evergreen spires of hemlock
make the valley exotic in every season, providing visual contrast and forest
aroma. Trunks of beech trees add tones
of silver and gray and their distinctive leaves are the color of copper.
Photo by Sharmon
Davidson / Branches of Hemlock Decorate a Big Beech
White oak was predominant in the cabin
clearing, and I spared a number of perfect specimens while removing several
black oak that crowded the site. Nearby
was a soaring tulip poplar, and on the slope toward the creek a sweet birch
grew, a relative of the cherry. Its bark
had a powerful wintergreen aroma when shaved from the trunk. Overhanging the water down there was a
serviceberry, called “sarvis” by the local folks, and it bloomed profusely in
the spring and made lots of fruit. Mountain
magnolia with its huge leaves were numerous in the woods, and on the island
sycamore and sweet gum prevailed.
Giant river birch, also known as
yellow birch, grew all along the banks of Kinniconick, and two of them hung
over the Swirl-hole during my years there, almost parallel to the water’s
surface. A few adventurous friends dove
from the trunks of those trees into the depths of the Swirl. Incidentally, in those days the depth of the
Swirl-hole was about twenty feet.
My final and most sad tree story
concerns the shoot that grew for a number of years from the rotted trunk of an
American Chestnut, just off the clearing.
Blight had destroyed all of the chestnut trees in North America by the
1930”s, but hope was alive that some blight-resistant shoots would provid seeds
of restoration. My shoot didn’t make it.
Here is a paragraph from Wikipedia
about the chestnut:
It is estimated that
in some places, such as the Appalachian Mountains, one in every four hardwoods
was an American Chestnut. Mature trees
often grew straight and branch-free for 50 feet and could grow up to 100 feet
tall with a trunk diameter of 14 feet at a few feet above ground level. For three centuries many barns and homes in
the Appalachians were made from chestnut.
Virgin chestnut trees in
Appalachia, over a hundred years ago.
The Kinniconick valley will always
be a land of trees. My hope is that future
generations will heed the words of an unknown author who wrote these words many
years ago:
Let’s
take our hearts
For a
walk in the woods
And listen
to the magic whispers
Of old trees
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