live ›› out loud
thousand seedlings with the Minnesota nursery. “You have to put a deposit down, and the trees take two years to grow, so you end up with quite a bit of capital invested. So I set on this trajectory to increase production by 5,000 every year—take the profits from this year to grow more next year.” He made the up-front investment and sold the seedlings to the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, which in turn sold them primarily to the CVNWR, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Nature Conservancy. And he’s grown the operation every year since: 85,000 seedlings in 2020. He’s now welcomed by huge commercial growers in the Pacific northwest. Tell me an understory The planting organizations’ aim is not a red spruce plantation, but a red spruce ecosystem. So Saville runs an ancillary micronursery in his own yard, starting associated trees and shrubs like mountain ash and witch hazel. To do that, he harvests seeds from dozens of species—each one based on hard-won expertise. “When I’m out in the woods, I pay attention to what’s flowering and where it is because, if I want to go out and collect Sorbus americana , I have to know where to look,” he says. “Then, once you know where a species is and when it’s flowering and fruiting, you have to be able to collect the fruit.” The drive into the mountains has to be timed just right—if the fruits are ripe today, the birds may have eaten them by tomorrow. “And then you have to get the seeds
out of the fruits—berry, cone, pod, whatever it is—so you can store them. To me, that’s the fun part. Every one is different, and you have to take all of your accumulated knowledge to do a new species because it’s not textbook stuff. You can’t watch a YouTube video.” Over two decades, Saville’s operation has made possible the planting of more than one million trees in West Virginia’s highlands. More than a million. They’re here and there but, planted in a square, 12 feet between them, they’d cover more than 5 square miles—an area larger than Elkins. A tree-planting ecosystem Saville has rooted his work as a citizen tree purveyor deeply, cultivating relationships in the state and federal agencies and conservation groups he partners with. Eventually, they formed the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative, CASRI, and coordinated their efforts to set as many acres as possible on the trajectory to functioning red spruce ecosystem. The reasons for planting red spruce are stacking up, Saville says. First it was protecting the salamander and squirrel, then it was also shading trout streams as a woolly adelgid killed hemlocks. Most recently, it’s the recognition that cool conifer forests like the red spruce ecosystem centered on the Monongahela National Forest are world-
class carbon sinks that counter the advance of climate change mightily.
Saville keeps hundreds of thousands of seeds in his refrigerator and starts thousands of trees
The agencies continually
grow their planting programs to reflect all of that. So in 2021, instead of adding 5,000 seedlings to start 90,000, he’s tripling down: He’ll start 240,000. He’s sure they’ll be planted. “Everybody’s looking at our effort—people bring tours to see what we’re doing here,” Saville says. “So many people are going above and beyond because they see how worthwhile this is. It’s something West Virginians should be proud of.” in his backyard micronursery.
Support Red Spruce To experience the old growth
red spruce ecosystem,
visit Gaudineer Scenic Area on the Randolph–
Pocahontas county line.
To support this effort, donate to
CASRI at restoreredspruce.org —or volunteer to help plant next spring.
60 wvl • fall 2020
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