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ealed in stackable plastic boxes alongside the milk and broccoli in Dave Saville’s refrigerator in Morgantown, hundreds of thousands of tree seeds are weathering fake
winter. Probably more like millions. It’s unusual, yes, but not so unlikely, for him. His family did run a garden center and Christmas tree farm in New York state. And he earned degrees in resource economics and forestry after he came to West Virginia University in 1977. Still, not everyone with that background would take it to the extreme place he’s taken it. Fir babies To be sure, Saville has done extreme things— like the legendarily gritty Blackwater 100 motocross races in Canaan Valley in the 1970s and ’80s. That’s what led him to notice the valley’s balsam fir. “They’re so grand and noble, the color and the branches,” he says. “I thought they were the most beautiful thing.” He was already enamored with the Canaan fir when the deadly balsam woolly adelgid infestation hit in the ’80s. About that same time, the Christmas tree industry was taking an interest in Canaan fir, too, so Saville teamed up with Jim Rockis, a Christmas tree grower in Fairchance, Pennsylvania, to save seeds and do plantings. Rockis, as it happened, was also a major processor of tree seed. They collected Canaan fir cones and extracted the seeds, and Saville contracted for 1,200 seedlings with a willing nursery Rockis knew in Minnesota— most only take jobs in the tens of thousands. When the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge (CVNWR) was established in the mid- ’90s and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to plant Canaan fir there, Saville had the relationships and the operation. He was the natural supplier. Sprucing things up All of this was already in place when, around 2000, the agencies mandated to protect the threatened Cheat Mountain salamander and endangered northern flying squirrel decided to plant red spruce. A century ago, logging and burning reduced West Virginia’s vast red spruce forest to 30,000 acres fragmented on knobs and in remote valleys. Reconnecting those pockets would improve the species’ chances. Red spruce is not commercially grown, and Saville, again, was the natural supplier. “So Jim Rockis and I started collecting red spruce cones.” That’s not just a trip to the woods on some free weekend. Red spruce fruit only every
four to eight years. Collecting cones means knowing it’s a fruiting year, knowing the cones ripen in October, then hunting spots where squirrels have cut cones from 60, 70 feet up and left them. If gathering cones requires specific knowledge, getting the seeds out is sorcery. “In nature, the cone is hanging down from the branch, tightly closed, and when it dries out it opens up,” Saville explains. “It triggers one or two seeds, and the seeds helicopter out. It
rains and the cone closes; it dries and triggers a few more seeds. It hangs there all winter long, triggering a seed or two at a time. So we have to mimic that.” They do that in
Dave Saville has learned through careful trial and error how to harvest seeds from dozens of native tree species.
kilns and tumblers in Rockis’ facility, running thousands of cones through several times each to coax the seeds out. Saville placed a first order for a few
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