My family’s first Christmas tree in the Adirondacks was a hemlock.
I know this for a fact because my father wrote about it in one of his first essays as a country editor, something he became when he and my mother moved us from Manhattan to Lewis, New York in 1956.
In his essay, he quotes a favorite author, John Burroughs, who remarked somewhere that “the hemlock is a clean, healthy, handsome tree” and a new neighbor, a tree farmer who told him that “trees seem to do better where there are people around.”
My father saw the grove of evergreens that shielded the house against the west winds blowing from Essex County’s plains of Abraham (which, he had just learned from a 1941 government report, has the shortest growing season in New York State) as part of a symbiotic relationship with our family: if we would maintain the trees, the trees would support us. As a former Daily Worker columnist, he was familiar with the 19th century socialists and anarchists who would have understood that relationship as the biological equivalent of mutualism, that is, the equitable, non-exploitive exchange of services.
The hemlock, my father wrote, was “our family tree.”
Of course, as he probably knew, foresters also refer to the hemlock as a family tree.
“No hemlock ever grows alone,” wrote William Chapman White, the New York Herald Tribune columnist whose favorite topics included the Adirondacks. “Below any hemlock, the seedlings stand close, all striving to grow up as straight and tall as their parent.”
White reminded his readers that the hemlock had all but vanished from the Adirondacks by the end of the 1880s, left to rot in the woods after being stripped of its bark, whose tannin fed the state’s 300 tanneries, two dozen of which were here in Warren County.
(Lake George’s Washington County shore and uplands are said to be the source of the last load of bark to be shipped “down below.”)
“That any hemlocks should remain at all today, particularly in the Adirondacks, is a forest wonder,” White wrote.
A few stands of old growth hemlock survived, either because they were inaccessible or because the tanning industry had collapsed before they could be reached, and those stands may have become the seedbeds that helped repopulate the Adirondacks.
Today, it has been estimated that there are 40,000 acres of hemlocks just within the Lake George watershed, covering more than half the DEC-designated Lake George Wild Forest.
According to Tammara Van Ryn, director of the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program (APIPP), “the population of hemlocks in the Lake George is as dense as you will find anywhere in its entire range.”
The hemlock is thus “the family tree” not only for individual families, but for much of the Adirondack Park. Its dense canopy is home to nesting birds and cools the streams to the temperatures required by cold water trout and other creatures.
But, as you no doubt know, the hemlock is under threat again, this time from an invasive pest, the hemlock wooly adelgid.
Earlier this season, we reported in the Lake George Mirror that a Lake George Hemlock Coalition has been formed to treat infected trees, develop biological controls to prevent future infestations and to identify priority stands which, Van Ryn said, “will become the reservoirs of healthy hemlocks that, we hope, will survive for generations to come.”
Should hemlock wooly adelgid devastate the Adirondacks as thoroughly as the tanning industry did, perhaps these stands will someday regenerate the Lake George Wild Forest, restoring the hemlock as “the family tree,” casting seeds to the forest floor, while, at the same time, protecting habitat and shielding homes at the edges of the Forest Preserve. At the very least, they may give us reason to have hopes for a lovelier future.
