Chapter 6

Suburban Wildwood

We arrived in Philadelphia with a very naive innocence about suburban life. Neither Carol nor I had ever lived anywhere for any appreciable time except on farms or schools surrounded by farmland and forest. We suffered from the usual rural impression of the urban landscape: lots of look-alike houses, sidewalks, and streets. We believed those contemporary novels that said life in the suburbs was boring. What we found was neither boring nor citified, but a suburban wilderness populated by all kinds of wildlife, including humans. We had no money except what I could borrow from Carol’s parents, and our idea was to buy a house in our price range (that is, real cheap) but that had some acreage with it. My plot was to turn the acreage into a tiny farm from which we could reap all the benefits of living on a larger farm without paying for it. That’s when my education in house hunting around a major city began. Wherever I found a place with one or two acres attached to it close enough to Philadelphia for commuting, I was in upper-income territory. Every tree on a property upped the asking price another couple of thousand dollars. Wherever I found houses with five or more acres attached, I was in estate country even rich people could barely afford. Most of the people who lived there, I learned, had the property handed down to them. It was a most ironical discovery. Estates for sale for half a million dollars—and not necessarily with a big old fancy house involved—could have been bought back in rural Ohio for $25,000. The environment we enjoyed as poorer, lower-middle-class farmers out in rural Ohio was blueblood estate land here.

But we kept looking. We narrowed in on Lower Gwynedd Township in Montgomery County north of Philadelphia because much of it was zoned for two-acre residential sites and I could ride the train handily from there into Center City. Most of the area was not quite urban, not quite suburban, not quite farm country, but a little bit of all three with a range of houses from humble to huge. It actually was an incredibly diverse place with lots of still-open space owned by wealthy families or investors who evidently had no need to sell the land yet for development. There was much woodland, quite a few open fields growing back to woodland, one of which near a crossroads called Bluebell was covered in spring with several acres of grape hyacinths. The meadow was absolutely breathtaking, but no one seemed to notice. Too busy getting their breaths taken away traveling to faraway places, I guess. Nineteenth-century barns and houses still very much in use contrasted with abandoned eighteenth-century farmsteads overgrown with young forest. A few real working farms still existed along with a scattering of recreational horse farms. A factory was hidden in woodland—by design. Zoning regulations specified that any factory had to be screened off by trees. Private and public schools including Gwynedd Mercy Academy contributed many acres of woodland and open fields too. A few conventional subdivisions had been developed, but most of the residential housing was a more or less unplanned sprinkling of old and new homes without sidewalks along single-lane country roads. Wissahickon Creek, bordered by woodland, ran through the township, adding still more of a wilderness touch to the landscape. Driving through the area, we had the feeling that we were going through a rural countryside because so many of the houses were hidden away among the trees.

We had just about given up on finding anything we could afford when we chanced upon a neat little bungalow on the very edge of the township, priced at $22,500 (this was 1964). Bungalow was a new word to me. It certainly wasn’t a bunga-high, but it came with two acres and a hump in the roof. That was dirt cheap for the area even if the roof had not needed fixing. The whole property was adorned with all kinds of ornamentals and trees. I could hardly believe my luck. What was going on here?

Ah-hah. We were looking at a house in what was called in those days a “mixed” neighborhood. This was the area where the servants on the rich estates of Gwynedd Valley had established residences as far back as the Civil War along the road that marked the boundary between Upper Gwynedd and Lower Gwynedd townships. Some of the residents were black. I was warned by those savvy about urban life, to “keep in mind” that an investment in an integrated community would mean that housing values would not rise as they would in pure white neighborhoods. My advisors did not see what I saw: possibly the only two-acre urban farm in the area that I could afford, and it butted right up against a five-acre woodland grove of trees. I didn’t care who lived across the street.

For the first time, but not the last, I followed the lesson I had learned in seminary days when the expert authorities had insisted that morel mushrooms were poisonous. I ignored the experts. We bought the house, fixed the roof, and lived happily there for nine years. Our black neighbors were, of course, just as nice as our white neighbors. When we sold, our house had risen in value just like all the other houses in the area had, and it sold quickly. In fact that house was by far the best investment I ever made. It doubled in price.

So began our years in the so-called suburbs. We continued to live our private lives almost exactly as we had before. While others around us went to the Jersey shore or the Poconos for recreation, we stayed home and vacationed in the wildwood around us. We raised much of our food, including our own chickens, eggs, and wheat for grain; cut wood from dead and dying trees to burn in our fireplace; hauled manure for the garden from nearby horse farms; hiked the fields and woodlands around us; gathered hickory nuts and walnuts; gleaned corn from cornfields; did a lot of bird watching; sledded on the hills round about; ice-skated on Wissahickon Creek; found arrowheads in the garden; cut our own wild red cedar Christmas tree from the woods; and picked many baskets of wild raspberries and blackberries from the vacant land nearby. I even found a softball league to play in. Nothing in our neighborhood was what popular culture had led us to expect from suburban life. It was like back home on the farm, only better in some ways. In the back two-thirds of our two acres, bordered by similar two-acre lots on either side, and with the five acres of woodland adjacent to us in the rear, we enjoyed as much privacy as we could have far out in rural countryside where the prying eyes of neighboring farmers leave no leaf unturned. We gardened and farmed and played happily in the sanctuary of what amounted to our own little private arboretum.

My morning walk to the train station was a stroll through woodland and abandoned fields. The terrain was thick with birds and wild animals. Hardly a morning went by that I did not see deer staring out at me through the underbrush. A Canada goose attacked me one morning when I blundered upon her nest along a creek in the woods. I felt like we were living on a new frontier, and perhaps that was true. And when, after a forty-five-minute train ride and a ten-block walk, I arrived at my office overlooking Washington Square Park, another grove of trees!

Unwittingly I became a frontiersman of urban farming. I spent a lot of time in the tree grove behind our gardens, which was almost impenetrable to civilized folk because it was overgrown with thorns and brush. It did not seem to belong to anyone, but had gotten left as an accidental remnant of wasteland between a highway, two-acre-lot zoning, and a church and cemetery property. There was a decrepit For Sale sign out by the highway, but because there was a rumor that the highway was going to be widened, no one was going to build there. The property may have belonged to the state or the county or the township for all I know. I never tried to find out. We used it as our own little park. An old buck deer with a beautiful rack liked this little snag of woodlot even more than I did and was almost always there. But deer are so adept at hiding themselves in small amounts of cover, I am fairly certain that I was the only human who knew of his presence. I would practice my stalking skills on him just to see how close he would allow me to approach. He must have realized after a while that I was no danger. He would tolerate my presence up to about twenty feet of intervening brush. Then he would move a few feet farther away. I would advance. He would move a little. Some days we would circle through the whole woodlot that way.

Some of the trees in this remnant were overgrown with bittersweet. It was American bittersweet, which sports nice clusters of berries, not the oriental bittersweet, which bears fruit in sort of single file up the stem. The latter can become viciously rampant and choke trees, especially seedlings. The American species is rampant enough and needs to be controlled a little too. I had never seen bittersweet climb up into really tall trees like it did here. Some of the vines were as thick as my wrist. It obviously had been growing here a long time. Visiting a greenhouse garden display, we found bunches of bittersweet for sale. We inquired. Yes, of course they would buy as many bittersweet bunches as we cared to sell.

So began our first “crop” from urban farming. Gathering the bittersweet was fairly pleasant work. I’d cut berry-laden vines as far up in the trees as I could reach on a ladder. We’d carry these strands back to our yard and then cut short lengths of vine and berries and tie them in bunches. It was work the kids could help do, and quite profitable for the amount of effort we spent. We sold bunches for fifty cents, and the greenhouse resold them for a dollar. I was surprised at the demand. It was not as if bittersweet were uncommon here in the wildwood like it was becoming back in Ohio, where the fencerows that once proliferated with the vine were being bulldozed away to make big fields out of little ones.

There were many other such possibilities throughout the township. Commercial farming was on its way out, but many woodlots and brushy areas remained or were growing back from when this land had been intensively farmed. Our back acre had an old dead furrow clearly visible running across it. In one new growth of forest between clusters of houses, a great old barn stood abandoned along with a springhouse nearby with cold, clear water still running through it. Judging from the age of the trees, a farmer some forty years earlier must have just walked away from the place, not willing to sell it or use it. I would sit in the springhouse and wonder exceedingly what had happened, as if I were looking at a specter that was invisible to others, which, in a way, it was. I could have gone to the courthouse and found out the story of this place, I suppose, but I never thought to investigate things like that then, as I would today. There was an old mill house hardly a half mile down our road, lending to the area a sense of a ghostly, nineteenth-century past.

Old fields were being overrun not only with new-growth woodland, but blackberries, raspberries, elderberries, and something new to me, wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius), which were similar to raspberries but “escapes” from domestic gardens. The idea that horticulture had prevailed here long enough for garden plants to run off into the woods was most intriguing. Immigrants from Europe had been gardening here since the late 1600s, which meant that woodland and dale would reflect nearly two more centuries of “civilization” compared to the part of Ohio I had come from. Some imaginative nursery company probably advertised the wineberry vigorously at one time and everyone had to try it, same as now with other exotic plants. I never found anybody still growing wineberries, which were not very tasty to me, but once again, without knowing the history of this remnant woodland, one might easily conclude that these berries were wild natives.

Blackberries and black raspberries proliferated in the woodland pockets, along roadsides, railroad tracks, and waterways, not to mention on the estates and horse farms. We would knock on the doors of estates unannounced and ask if we could hike along their horse trails and pick wild berries and nuts. Invariably we would receive permission to do so. There was a marvelous acceptance of the public in the area, or at least of our family, which would not have been true in more traditional farm country back in Ohio. Maybe it was because we knew some of the property owners by riding on the commuter train, or maybe it was because we seemed to be about the only ones taking advantage of their hospitality. In one of our woodland picnic spots through which a lively little spring-fed creek ran, we were accosted once by a landowner on a horse. He seemed a bit provoked at first. I was making the kids a little waterwheel in the creek like my father had made for me. The landowner was intrigued. I told him we came to this spot often and that we were there not to harm or disturb anything. In fact, I could act as a sort of free caretaker and report to him if I saw anything questionable going on. He never challenged us again.

We found another horticultural “escape” in the tree grove behind our place. Cherry trees were growing there that I could not identify. When ripe, the fruits resembled black sweet cherries but were somewhat smaller and less fleshy than the sweet cherries growing on our property. After much research (the cherry family is very large and has been cultivated for many centuries), it appeared that these trees were escapes of Prunus avium. Birds eat cherries in a garden or orchard, then excrete the seeds everywhere. But seedling trees like this do not usually come true to the parent. Since sweet cherries and sour cherries and crosses between them are widely grown, it was very difficult to know exactly the parentage of our particular escape. But the fruit was quite good, even though of smaller size than named varieties of sweet cherries, and we would have harvested more of them if we did not have our own domestic trees growing on our two-acre “estate.”

Carol was reminded of a scene from her childhood. There were wild cherry trees growing on her farm in Kentucky too, and she and her cousin would spend hours sitting up in the branches gorging on the fruits. She was sure the fruits were not wild black cherries or chokecherries because, believe me, you would not gorge on either of these two brackish-tasting fruits. But what variety those trees were, she was not sure. Maybe they weren’t wild escapes at all, but planted by the same mystery person who planted the Thomas walnuts. To me the real significance was how much food there was growing wild or semi-wild, and no one cared about it.

We were always running into a new tree species everywhere we walked in the township. Temple University had a branch out our way devoted mainly to horticultural research, which meant another tract of woodland adorning the township. When I pulled into the parking lot the first time I saw a towering tree with leaves unfamiliar to me. Also, there was a stench in the air that smelled like too many dogs were running loose on the property. The smell was emanating from what looked like fruit that littered the ground under the tree, and the fruit was obviously emanating from the tree. When I asked about the identity of the tree from one of the people working there, I was transfixed by his answer. I was looking at a ginkgo tree, a species that, according to fossil records, dates back 270 million years! The man smiled at what I am sure was a look of utter disbelief on my face. But that was only the beginning of my surprise. Ginkgo trees know something about survival. They survived the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945! And that awful smell was not really fruit in the usual sense but a sort of fleshy covering over the seeds. The nutlike meats inside the seeds are an esteemed food throughout Asia. In fact, the ginkgo could provide debate material for just about anything botanical one wanted to argue. Good to eat maybe, but eat more than about fifty seeds at a time and you could be poisoned. Beautiful yellow leaves in the fall, but they can cause a rash like poison ivy on those allergic to them. It is regarded as a possible cure for attention deficit disorder, or maybe not, depending upon which scientific opinion one wants to believe.

For days my mind kept going back to those ginkgo seeds. How could humans have decided to eat something that came wrapped in a gooey mucous that smelled like feces, that would blister skin allergic to it, to get at a seed that had to be washed and cracked to get a nutmeat that, eaten in excess, was poisonous? Why had human civilization developed such an intricate, intensive kind of knowledge? I finally figured it out, I think—another of those very obvious answers that are so hard to discover. In my work environment as a farm-magazine editor, I tended to think of everything from an agricultural point of view. Therein lay the answer. People would go to such fantastically far-out trouble to get food because they had no choice. Unlike modern times, when we take modern farming for granted, for thousands upon thousands of years there was no way to till the soil in large amounts, but all too easy to increase population beyond carrying capacity. When that happened, human society had to explore every food possibility that nature offered, or die. Civilizations had risen (and fallen) on the expertise of hunting and gathering food.

But no one was much impressed with what was for me a sensational discovery. With all the tremendous advances in science, we could as a society survive just fine on naturally growing plants, especially trees, if and when it was obvious that tillage farming would just mean more erosion, more lost cities in the desert. I wanted to write about this, but you can imagine how that went over with a farm magazine. When I would tell acquaintances about my “new” tree that was 270 million years old, they mostly just shrugged. So I merely stored away my knowledge. At least I knew that if I were starving to death in a land destroyed by nuclear warfare, I could hope to find ginkgo trees, wash away the stinky stuff on the seeds and eat them. As strange as a thought like that might seem, there is some comfort in it. The ginkgo can outlast all things human and nuclear and be patiently growing when the next round of evolutionary man should arrive on the scene starving hungry.

In another grove hardly a thousand feet from our house on the other side of the road I first met what I think is the most unusual tree in the American forest. I was walking along, minding my own business, as they say, a little solemn and forlorn because it was November and I was thinking winter. Suddenly, I was face to face with a shrubby little tree that was shimmering with bright yellow blossoms! At first I wasn’t sure they were flowers. How could they be, this time of year? Looked more like little fluffs of narrow yellow ribbon hanging on the branches. I raced home to study my tree books. I was sure this quaint plant had to be some exotic escape from a long-ago English immigrant’s garden.

It was a witch hazel, an appropriately bewitching name for such a strange little tree. But it was not a stranger and in fact was quite common in cut-over woodland in the eastern United States. More to the point, it was another example of legitimate folk medicine that Native Americans had taught the early settlers to use. In this case, witch hazel oil helps soothe and heal skin rashes, cuts, and bruises. In fact witch hazel is commonly sold in drugstores all over. Where had I been?

Over the next year we visited our new acquaintance frequently. The yellow blossoms of November turned to calyxes that looked like tiny urns—in folklore, these receptacles for the nuts or seeds were said to be the wood elves’ drinking cups. The calyxes or husks stayed fairly greenish for a whole year, turning brown in the frosts of the following fall. Then an almost alarming event took place. The husks cracked open with such force that the seeds, brownish black with a white dot on them, shot out with a loud popping noise. The seeds can travel up to forty feet and cause pain if they strike a person in the head or face. I stood around awhile, hoping to get wounded so I could write about it, but no luck.

Water dowsers, at least in times past, preferred a witch hazel branch for finding water, so the books said. The word witch as applied to this tree had nothing to do with the usual meaning of “witch” but was a corruption of the Old English word wych, which means “flexible.” Witch hazel branches are indeed very flexible, and I have my own contrary explanation for why it became the choice for dowsing rods. In earlier years, I had gone through a period of being extremely interested in divining rods (another cultural use of wood) and had learned a thing or two that dowsers do not appreciate hearing. I studied the folklore involved too, at the university. I watched dowsers at work, I listened to stories of how the power was so strong in some dowsers that when they held their forked sticks over a good water source, the attraction was great enough to almost wrench the dowsing stick out of their hands if they tried to stop it from pointing down to the underground water. So I experimented. I discovered there was a bit of a leverage trick involved. Grasp the ends of the two forks of the Y-shaped branch in one’s fists with the stem pointing out ahead. With just the right amount of pressure on the very flexible branches, I could make it look for sure like the stick was tipping over toward the earth while I was trying with all my strength to hold it back. The way I was bending the branches forced the pointer downward. That would explain why witch hazel was called witch hazel. The wood was, indeed, very wych—very flexible.

I was also enchanted by how the evergreen trees that grew all over this area of abandoned farmland reseeded themselves. I think these were Virginia pines. In my home country, if you wanted evergreens you had to buy plants and set them out. Here I could have all the evergreens I desired for free, just by transplanting the proliferating seedlings or planting the pine cones.

My knowledge of trees grew considerably in our suburban wildwood also because the former owner of our property had planted some exotic species there. One was a beauty called a golden chain tree or laburnum. In spring it fairly dripped with long pendulous clusters of bright yellow flowers—very attractive. For several years I admired it greatly, growing near the house next to a little wading pool that the former owners had also installed. It was hard to keep the kids out of the water, and we didn’t try. Then, one year, I decided to find out more about the tree. To my dismay, all parts of laburnum are poisonous. I was facing another example of what I now called “sassafras syndrome.”

The “authorities” had moved heaven and earth to ban sassafras tea from human society even though people had been drinking it for unnumbered generations. But I could find little hint in nursery catalogs about the possible toxicity of laburnum. Sometimes there was a brief, passing mention, between the glowing adjectives about the tree’s beauty, that, ahem, well, yes, this plant is toxic in all its parts, but nowhere was anything close to a red flag raised. Will some wise savant far up there on a mountaintop contemplating the mysteries of life please explain this dichotomy to me? We felt we had to cut the tree down because of the kids playing around it. We had enough dangers to deal with on our suburban frontier. At least there were no sassafras trees around to rain cancer down upon our hapless heads.

The former owners of our poor man’s estate had planted other trees and ornamentals new to me: a weeping cherry, boxwoods, dogwoods, flowering crabs, all kinds of fruit trees. The white birches may have been a mistake since they do not live long and died while we were in residence. But they were so beautiful that the lack of longevity could be excused. Not so for the Lombardy poplars planted along the back border of the property next to the woods. They were not, to my way of thinking, very beautiful—tall and skinny and rarely living to be twenty years old. When I cut them down (not very good firewood either) I carelessly made the same mistake I had made when cutting firewood back home years earlier. The trees were only about eight inches in diameter, so I figured they would fall easily whichever way I notched them. Once again, one of them fell away from the notch. I’m not sure why; it just did. What made this a memorable mistake was that it fell exactly on my ancient walking wheel cultivator standing all alone in a garden plot nearby. There are 360 degrees in a circle, but the tree fell in that one degree where it landed squarely on the cultivator, smashing it beyond repair. Things could have been worse. It missed the chicken coop.

It would have been difficult if not impossible to use wedges on an eight-inch-diameter tree to make sure the tree fell toward the notch. There was not enough room to insert the wedge behind the chainsaw bar. Since then I have learned a little trick from a timber cutter friend. In a case like this (he used it on bigger trees too) he would leave a little bit of uncut wood intact at the beginning of the cut opposite the notch, sawing in behind it and then across the diameter of the trunk. Then, when the kerf was getting close to the notch and the tree ready to go over, he drove wedges in on either side of the little section of intact trunk that he had left uncut. With the wedges firmly in place, he then removed the uncut section by plunge-cutting with the tip of the blade, allowing the tree to fall the right way. Looks really clever when done correctly, but it requires experience.

The Lombardy joke, as we referred to the tree destroying the cultivator, taught me a lesson I would learn over and over again. Trees advertised as “fast growing” should be avoided in landscaping. In the world of plants, there is a law of diminishing returns. If a tree species grows faster than average, it will generally be less valuable as wood and invariably will not live long.

Most oak species grow slowly, and the wood contains at least twice as many BTUs as poplar, has twice the strength, has four to five times the longevity, and so forth. What’s more, the seemingly slower-growing trees aren’t all that slow. Once rooted down well and in good sun, an oak grows plenty fast enough, as anyone knows who has to worry about trees crowding each other in a yard or shading out a garden plot, or growing over a roof. If one is willing to be a little patient while a tree is growing its first ten to fifteen feet up, from then on slow-growing trees are much more desirable in a yard.

At Farm Journal magazine, my responsibility was covering the news in fruit and vegetable production, which was, typical of my life experiences, the area of farming I knew least about. But it worked perfectly with my secret schemes for turning our two acres into an urban farm. Being fruits and vegetables editor was like taking college courses in horticulture, only I was getting paid to do it. Reporting the news in these areas provided me with all kinds of ideas about growing high-value crops on small acreages. I began to entertain fanciful schemes. Blueberries grew wonderfully well in this soil, another great curiosity since I had never seen them before. I would start a little blueberry farm. Maybe. I dug a hole back behind the chicken coop and buried a cattle watering trough. I would funnel the water off the chicken coop roof and raise fish in the tank. Maybe. We had four huge oak trees in the yard. I learned on visits to orchards in California that the Native Americans had perfected ways to soak the tannin out of acorns and make delicious meal for bread. I could do that too. Maybe. The crabapple trees bore tremendous crops of fruit without spraying. We could make delicious exotic jelly and sell it. Maybe. I would open a roadside market for woodland products. Maybe.

I began to hatch a plan. I would rent the back acre of the properties on either side of me. After I got to know my neighbors well, I was fairly certain they would agree to do that because they were tired of mowing all that lawn. One of them had a very nice planting of blueberries already on his back acre and he might even be willing to partner with me. I would rent or buy the remnant tree grove right behind us. That would give us about ten acres altogether to play with.

One reason this dream was so enticing was what I had learned from the neighbor right across the street from us. He was a professional gardener, now retired, but still tending a large, exquisite planting of iris in a glade between his big old brick Victorian house and his grove of pine trees. He was actually hybridizing his own varieties. He wanted to develop a bright red iris, which he said did not exist, and make a fortune selling it. He was even more a dreamer than I was, but he opened up a whole new world to me. Flowers could be a cash crop too, and a very lucrative one. He also had chickens and scrupulously saved every scrap of manure and bedding for compost.

What was just as amazing as the iris idea to me was that I could stand there between the flowers, the chicken coop, the grove of pine trees, and the house and be as hidden from the world as if I were standing in the middle of the Jersey Pine Barrens not so far away, where he had lived previously and an area I became very interested in by and by. The way privacy and woodland solitude could be achieved in a small place just with landscaping was most intriguing. He had a tiny urban farm going here, with its own possible commercial crop—iris sold either as bulbs (rhizomes) for planting or as cut flowers.

This possibility of finding woodland sanctuary even in areas of quite dense human population manifested itself even in the city. Not far from the offices of Farm Journal (it was headquartered in a big city because it was originally published for farmers “within a day’s ride on horseback from Philadelphia”), there were many historical monuments and houses and little walled gardens, much in the fashion of the walled gardens of England. These were open to the public, more or less, but hardly anyone frequented them. I did. At noon, I would walk the several blocks to these walled gardens and tree groves to soak up the tranquility to be found there. The life of a magazine reporter can be very hectic, and these interludes helped me just like woodland in the countryside did. Sitting in one of these walled gardens, the first thing noticeable was the quiet. Though I was in the heart of a city, silence lingered among the boxwoods, dogwoods, Bradford pears, and rhododendrons. It got me to thinking. Why should such lovely places belong to the wealthy only? The poorest person can grow trees and flowers. The poorest person could, in fact, make bricks and pile them up into walls. All it takes is mud and sunshine, which is sort of true of trees too. And if bricks were out of the question, the poorest person could make wooden stockades from the trees and provide privacy and beauty too. Did we really need so much money in the world?

Just as trees kept intruding into my human environment in seminary, college, and graduate school, so now they stalked, literally, into my downtown Farm Journal office. An elderly man, a farmer as he turned out to be, came in, bearing wood. When he asked the receptionist downstairs if he could see the editor in charge of that subject, she sent him to me. She always sent visitors with offbeat interests to me since I was generally thought to be the magazine’s token offbeat person. None of us were accustomed to farmers with enough aplomb to come sauntering into downtown Philadelphia without warning, so I was very curious. He drew two blocks of wood out of his satchel, set them on my desk, and commenced to talk about what he called the fastest-growing tree in the world. That moment marks the true beginning of this book, although I did not know that until much later.

The farmer’s name was Miles Fry, and he was quite the character, surely one of the most amazing people I ever met. He milked cows out in the middle of Pennsylvania, near the town of Ephrata, and since I also was, or had been, a milker of cows, we had instant rapport. (Two milkers of cows will find each other, even in a stadium full of non-milkers of cows. I think it is the aura of suffering and patience that lingers over anyone who has spent a lot of time with the back end, or the front end, of a bovine.)

Anyway, he finally got down to the reason for his visit. He had been experimenting with hybrid poplar trees and had a notion that he could save the world with them. I was a sucker for saving-the-world notions, so we got along fine. All you had to do, he said, was shove a live twig from a hybrid poplar tree into the soil of a spoil bank or any other land wasted by the hand of mankind, and it would sprout, grow, and attain a height of twenty-five feet in five years. Not only did it turn wasteland into productive soil, but as I could see, the wood made fairly decent lumber too.

So began a truly amazing episode in my life. I went out to visit Miles’s hybrid poplar plantations even though Farm Journal was almost totally focused on corn, hogs, soybeans, cotton, and cattle. The way his trees grew on spoil banks was truly impressive. On good land, well, you almost needed to stick the cutting in the ground and jump back fast to keep the tree from knocking your hat off. So I wrote a little article, I’m sure in that vein, and eventually it ran in the magazine. To the utter surprise of everyone, except maybe Miles himself, replies came pouring in, and even more filled Miles’s country mailbox. In a few months he had a file cabinet with some twelve thousand letters in it from all over the world. Nothing like that had ever happened at the magazine, even when we ran articles on the first three-hundred-bushel-an-acre corn yield. For the first time, I realized that my keen interest in trees was shared by quite an army of people out there.

The response launched Miles and his son Mort into a new business, growing and selling hybrid poplar cuttings and trees. Eventually the family expanded into the greenhouse industry, and today the company is one of the largest producers of flowers in the country. They still sell hybrid poplars (check out Frysville Hybrid Poplars online), but it is only a minor part of the business now. The trees have been mostly marketed over the years for residential screening since they do grow fast enough to screen off a house quickly from, say, a street. But since it is so easy to start a new tree with a cutting, and so hard to get rid of one after it has rooted (cut one off at ground level and another pops up, making them excellent for coppicing), the market has dropped off. Most of the poplars the company sells today are for landfill and wasteland bioremediation. On some sites where the soil has been almost totally sterilized by industrial pollution, engineers have found that they could dig a hole down as much as ten or twelve feet to groundwater, stick a hybrid poplar down that far, and it will root and grow and over the years absorb the poisons out of the soil into the tree fibers.

Mort Fry took over the business after his father’s death in 1982. One of the most novel ways he tried to use his fast-growing trees for energy production was as a fuel for methane gasifiers. I remember well when he wrote me enthusiastically of a gasifier that he and his engineers had built and installed in his pickup truck bed, running the truck on hybrid poplar wood. He once, just to prove a point, made a trip up through New England and used scrap wood and branches he picked up along the road to fuel the truck. This was in the early days of “green” energy, and of course we were very excited. His gasifier really did work, but as all of us learned who have been involved for a long time in green energy ideas, this was yet another alternative that was more costly than oil and gasoline. Eventually Mort parked his truck and started building greenhouses and growing flowers. This project is worth a story in itself because he still lives on the farm where he grew up milking cows, and in fact the whole family lives nearby, with a grandchild now coming into the business. Nine generations of the Frys have lived and worked on that farm, always adapting to the changing times, but always, to this day, remaining farmers and keepers of their land.

A most fortunate acquaintanceship that came my way in the suburban wildwood was a fellow editor at the magazine, Dick Davids. He was a self-taught naturalist who had grown up in the north woods of Minnesota and would go back there to die. He had come to our cabin in the woods in Indiana and talked all night, then called a few days later from Philadelphia and offered me a job. We shared enough love of woodland and farmland to have instant rapport. He was also a master at journalistic writing and taught me enough to keep me from being fired. We developed a close friendship.

Dick came for a visit soon after we had gotten situated in our new home. As I was showing him my suburban wilderness one day in early May, he stopped suddenly under the two big pin oak trees in our yard and said: “Did you hear that?”

I looked at him stupidly. I heard nothing unusual. “I think you’ve got warblers moving through.” He had grown quite excited. I still looked at him stupidly. Warbler was a word in the dictionary to me, meaning a singer of human song. The raspy noise that I did finally hear was totally unfamiliar. He divined my ignorance.

“You got binoculars?” he asked. I shook my head.

“You gotta get binoculars.” He trotted back to his car in the driveway and came back with a pair. Peering up through the tree branches, he grunted and pulled me toward him with a free hand.

“Look up there.” He shoved the binoculars in my hand.

At first I saw nothing. I swept through the branches with the lenses and then, suddenly, there was a little bit of feathered jewel flitting about while making a high-pitched, buzzy sound: bright orange throat, black above, black-and-white striped below.

“It’s a Blackburnian warbler,” he said. He was trying to get the binoculars away from me, but now I caught movement farther up in the tree. To my astonishment, another little bird was flitting about, a bright yellow bird with orange stripes on its breast. Dick identified it as a yellow warbler. I was totally carried away. Before the afternoon was over, we had sighted three other tiny, brightly colored birds, which Dick identified as a parula warbler, a magnolia warbler, and a black-and-white warbler. In less than an hour I had become a committed bird watcher, swept away by the awesome realization that these birds had been part of my woodland life all along, and I had not known it. Every spring they migrated through at least the whole eastern half of the nation, even on the homelands back in Ohio, and I had not known that they even existed. It took binoculars to see the color. Otherwise the tiny birds looked like just large insects buzzing in the trees. I did not know it at the time, but Dick Davids was also a respected authority on birds and would eventually write a book about ornithology. He could identify all the birds in America even though he was color-blind. I have him to thank for introducing me to one of the most charming aspects of living among the trees.

Then something else quite striking happened to keep my inner mind focused on the forest. I discovered the Pine Barrens. Or rather Dick kept insisting that I do some exploring there, emphasizing over and over again that just a few miles from either Philadelphia or New York was one of the wildest places in the nation with an assortment of wildlife—including some human inhabitants—equal to any wilderness. Among other startling facts, there were over twenty varieties of wild orchids there.

I learned that there was something totally enchanting about the Pine Barrens, about a thousand square miles of unbroken forest that was (in a much larger sense than Lower Gwynedd township where we lived) a suburban wilderness to the cities that surrounded it. I had always thought of New Jersey in terms of Camden, Trenton, and Jersey City, and considered it, unfairly, as the tailbone of creation. That these cities existed right beside the Pine Barrens was awesome. Once Carol and I and the kids almost got lost in the Barrens, since it is extremely easy to lose track of your place in the sameness, or seeming sameness, of these pine and oak woodlands. Fortunately, I had noticed the direction of the current in the stream of pure but tea-colored water where we stopped and entered the trees. The forest floor was white sand, the plants different from what I was used to seeing. As we frolicked along in this strange Land of Oz, I suddenly realized that I had lost my sense of direction. But luckily we found the creek again, surely the same creek, and I knew enough to follow it upstream to get back to the road.

My main interest in the Pine Barrens was the fact that blueberries flourished there, and I was thinking of a suburban blueberry farm. But I had so little time to explore this huge suburban forest that my knowledge of what was going on there was scant indeed. Just at this time (again, with the uncanny happenstance that always seemed to occur just when I needed it), John McPhee, my favorite writer back then, published his book, The Pine Barrens (1967), first in the New Yorker and then in book form the following year. (I quote from the 1981 edition below.) That was precisely the time I started traveling into the Pine Barrens. But without McPhee, I would not have had nearly enough knowledge to realize that there was a larger connection to my slowly forming enchantment with woodland than merely whimsical attraction. McPhee acquainted me with the forest dwellers in the Pine Barrens themselves, and his words gave me that little tingling sensation in the back of my neck that made me suspect that I might be on to something that my brain could not yet discern. Here’s McPhee, quoting the piney woods dwellers:

“I’m just a woods boy,” a fellow named Jim Leek told me one day. “There ain’t nobody bothers you here. You can be alone.” . . . [H]e was sounding two primary themes of the pines. Bill Wasovwich said one day, “The woods just look nice and it’s more quieter. It’s quieter anywhere in the pines.”. . . Another man
. . . said . . . “A sense of security is high among us. We were from pioneers. We know how to survive in the woods.”. . . “I love it here. I can do as I damn please. I love the woods. I could live in a sixty-five-thousand-dollar home [remember this is the 1960s] on Telegraph Road but I love the woods.”

I understood that kind of talk. McPhee’s description of life in the Pine Barrens revealed a remarkable example of how a woodland culture could take care of itself. The economy of the Barrens at that time was based on production and sales of sphagnum moss, blueberries, cranberries, Christmas decorations (including lots of pine cones for New York City markets), and wood products, including charcoal. People who looked poor and lived in unpainted houses could in fact, as McPhee pointed out with ever-growing reverence for his subjects, have all the money they needed or wanted. They didn’t paint their houses because that would make their property taxes go up. People chose to live in the Barrens because they liked independence more than money or acclaim. It has been nearly forty years since I’ve been in the Pine Barrens, and I suppose by now the march of “development” has penetrated even its fastnesses. But I like to think not. I like to think that there are woodland culture people still living there and showing us the road to survival.

In about 1970 Dick Davids resigned and went back to the north woods of Minnesota where he had grown up. I was angry a little, not because he went back to his roots, but because I wanted to do the same and was afraid to. Afraid I did not have enough money. I envied him so much. Then he wrote a book, The Man Who Moved a Mountain (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), in which he examined in marvelous detail life in a backwoods community in the Blue Ridge Mountains, making the same points that McPhee had done with a Pine Barrens community. Here again there were people who were willing to endure hardships that modern life promises escape from, simply because they loved the woods. Unwittingly, he also provided me with significant information for this book, which I did not even know I was going to write someday. He described how important the American chestnut was to the economy of the backwoods and suggested that the tree’s demise (due to a chestnut blight introduced from Asia early in the twentieth century) might explain more of the poverty in Appalachia than the Great Depression, which had occurred about the same time. The American chestnut had provided a major source of food for humans and hogs, plus direct cash income from selling chestnuts to urban markets. The wood was ideal for building, fencing, and fuel. The tree also provided medicine. Davids quotes a mountain mother: “A grove of chestnuts is a better provider than any man—easier to have around too.”

Someday, perhaps, the new blight-resistant strains of chestnuts that have been developed could once again cover the Appalachian hillsides, could spawn a new woodland culture that would not have to live on welfare. There are plenty of people who want to live that way, but they have been taught that it is impossible.

Where the pharmaceutical factory stood in Lower Gwynedd Township, hidden by woodland, I had another out-of-world experience. The factory owners did not discourage hikers in their woodland, and so we often walked back into the trees, which also included quite a stand of rhododendron. I think, but could never document, that this flowering shrub was native to the place, not planted by humans. Then I discovered a very dense grove of hemlock trees. I felt just as I had felt years ago on Hicky Hill in that pine grove of southern Indiana, only more intensely. The hemlock foliage was much thicker, and the further I penetrated it, the darker the surroundings became although it was midday, becoming finally almost like night. And utterly quiet. I might have been in a boreal forest of northern Canada for all I could tell. The trees were large, blocking out all sign of the sky, and the resulting light, or lack of light, was uncannily spooky. I wondered who had planted these trees because I doubt they would have grown that thickly in a natural stand. But I could not know for sure. If they were well over a hundred years old, could it be a natural stand? To go into a place like that with vexing journalistic endeavors crowding my mind was like entering a cloister. In a little while, peace ruled in my mind. It was at this time that I discovered and was getting to know Andrew Wyeth, certainly one of the world’s greatest living painters. I often thought that if I could get him into this grove of hemlocks, he could and would reveal the secrets of his creative process to me. But it took me thirty more years to get an audience with him.

There had to be natives of the area who knew the natural history of this hemlock grove as well as I knew the history of our oak groves in Ohio. Hemlock bark was used commercially for tanning leather, so perhaps the stand had been purposefully planted about 1800 for that reason. But I did not know how to go about finding the people who might retain that kind of memory. I was a stranger in a strange land. I always felt that I was merely visiting, waiting to go home.

But if I did not know the past, I surely could see the future. This idyllic suburban wildwood was changing. More and more subdivisions pressed in, more and more zoning fights kept local authorities busy. The pressure of population would have its way. If people were going to work here, they must have a place to live, so the inevitable had to happen. It came to me shortly after the wooded and shrubby area I walked through every day to the train station became a busy scene of surveying. The houses were coming. This part-field, part-shrubby woodland lay directly across from the William Penn Inn, one of the area’s finest restaurants. The owners, not to mention many of the patrons, became very incensed over this development, and when they couldn’t stop it, they purchased land in front of it along the highway and across from the restaurant, and put up an earthen bank that obscured the new development from view. One could sit in the restaurant and look out on a scene that had not changed for maybe a century: trees, brush, open field, and, most of all, no houses. That bank was as perfect a statement of what was happening as an artist could paint or a novelist could write.

The new highway construction that threatened to take the little woods behind our property went from rumor stage to public hearing stage. Citizens got up to rant and rave against it, against anything that would threaten, in their minds, the harmony of their place. The whole area for a radius of thirty miles beyond Philadelphia’s limits became a scene of feverish dispute. The developers almost always won, because, of course, population was rising fast, people had to have a place to live, and even the protestors kept right on having babies. Few people seemed to see the causal connection and the mathematical certainty that uncontrolled birthrates and suburban wildwood cannot forever coexist. I realized then that we had come to this place at that precise moment in its history when it contained an almost idyllic environment of city, suburb, and countryside. Society was not willing, probably was not able, to keep it that way.

Another turning event in my life happened at this time. A little book of poetry happened across my desk called Farming: A Handbook. I read hardly five poems in it and was so moved that I walked right down to my boss’s office (Lane Palmer) and told him that I was going to Kentucky to write a story about a man named Wendell Berry who wrote much better poetry than Whittier or Longfellow or any of those other so-called fathers of American literature. Since I seldom volunteered to travel, I think Lane was taken aback. He allowed the trip even if this Wendell Berry guy did not raise record-breaking crops of corn or soybeans, our usual hero types in the magazine.

So it came to be that along the Kentucky River, in his cabin in the woods, I met the man most influential to me as a writer and woodsman. He would become my close friend and remains so to this day. One of the things I remember from that first visit was walking in his woods. He picked up a persimmon, gouged out a seed, cut it open with his pocketknife and showed me how the face of the inner seed so cut looked exactly like a tiny tree. Later he wrote in the poem “The Wild Geese”:

. . . We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow. . . .

(From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry [San Francisco: Counterpoint, 1998])

I came back from that first visit knowing for sure that I wanted to live like Wendell Berry and know the woods as he did.

A salesman came to our door not long after that, wanting to sell us cemetery plots. Death was not something that I had thought about much. I realized immediately that I did not want to be buried in a strange land, even though this strange land had been a delight. I couldn’t explain that feeling even in the depth of the hemlock grove, and fortunately Carol did not demand that I try. Snider’s Woods, and Kerr’s Woods and Adrian’s Woods were calling me, and they were promising me, or so I divined, that population pressures would never destroy my Wyandot County with “development.” Carol and I talked far into the night. She was kind enough to go along with moving to Ohio rather than back to her homeland in Kentucky, where “development” had already turned her home farm into a subdivision. At least Ohio was closer to her family than eastern Pennsylvania. Or as Wendell would say, from his home in Kentucky, moving to Ohio was almost like becoming neighbors.