Virgin forests of Hemlock trees, up to 500 years old, have died.  One was in my back yard.  In the seventies, I did an Eagle Scout project to maintain the health of another grove in the area, the Hemlock Hill Giants.   These stands are very rare on the East Coast because most of these giants were cut in the early nineteen hundreds, from 1900 to 1935.  Those trees that survived the cuttings at the turn of the last century were in isolated stands and towered majestically over the other trees around them. They had thrived since 1500 during the era when Columbus found the Americas.   Since then, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution have come and gone and numerous wars, including the Revolutionary and the Civil wars, have been fought in the shadow of these trees.

In my own backyard, over the last ten years, these gentle giants have died and developers have given them their final death blow, putting them out of their misery.  Hemlock Hill in Banner Elk has not been developed still sports standing, but dead, gigantic Hemlock trees, five feet plus across from this same era. Although standing, they are all dead or close to it.  All this is thanks to the Hemlock woolly adelgid which has been devastating to the Hemlock in the USA.  This is a bug that came to United States, first to the Pacific Northwest in the 1920’s from Asia; it traveled east and was introduced to the Northeast in the 1950’s. Closer to western North Carolina, the woolly adelgid was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1967.  It is an insect which feeds on the fluid in the hemlocks; its egg sacs look like the tips of cotton swabs, clinging to the underside of the branches of the hemlock trees. It devastates and defoliates the trees.   It has spread at a rate of about 20 miles per year.  It takes no hostages and kills every hemlock in its path unless the tree is treated and the treatments are hard and usually unsuccessfully applied to these giant trees of the East Coast.

Fraser Fir on the other hand has a brighter future.  Large stands of native Fraser Fir exist on Mount Rogers and in the southern North Carolina mountains.  Roan Mountain has the largest stand of Fraser Fir trees and is the largest seed source for Fraser in the world.  It sits on the North Carolina- Tennessee state line and is bisected by one of the most beautiful sections of the Appalachian Trail, according to National Geographic.  These trees are amazingly healthy compared to the Hemlocks even though they too are being attacked by a different Adelgid, the Balsam Woolly Adeglid, which was imported from Europe.  There are trees dying here and there; it is hard to tell the exact cause of death but their tops are straight and their foliage is green. The first major sign of damage from Balsam Wooly Adelgid is a crooked top.  Also, there are hundreds of thousands of healthy Fraser Fir trees producing cones, which we pick with cherry pickers from the access roads.  We used to drag ladders through these groves and climb the trees however,  this is now prohibited by the forest service because the trees were being damaged.  I have climbed Frasers that were 70 feet high;  it is great fun to be in a mature Fraser Fir,  whose seedlings we work so intensively with over several years to produce Christmas trees.  The bottom line is that Frasers though threatened are surviving; the young trees on the forest floor are numerous and taking the place of any trees that go down.  It looks like Frasers will survive the Balsam adelgid, acid rain, ozone and anything else that is out there currently, whereas the Hemlock is going down for the count unless they are sprayed and treated intensively.  

I personally mourn the demise of the hemlock; what a great and beautiful tree.   It is very sad and ranks in terms of tragedy right in there with the vanishing of the American Chestnut tree in the early years of the 2oth century; the American Chestnut had developed a blight imported from Asia.   At some point a disease- resistant chestnut could reach maturity and a generation or two from now could witness this. Foundations are working on making this happen. For the Hemlock, it will take seven or eight human generations before we could appreciate the majesty of a mature hemlock again; we have got a long wait.

Tags: Add new tag, Balsam Wooly Adelgid, Hemlock Wooly adelgid, native Fraser Fir

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