The woods around the mountain have closed the green curtain. Just a few weeks ago the view into the forest from Fouche Gap Road was open. Now the trees have leafed out and all that’s visible is succeeding planes of green. I suppose the view is somewhat more open if you walk into the woods, but every plant is greedy for sunlight, so they wall in the open road with leaves.

Every level of the forest is green, from the ground up. The upper levels and the understory trees are green. The muscadine vines are green. Even the beds of poison ivy are so lush and that they look almost inviting.

This is the view from Fouche Gap Road back in December. It wasn’t so very different a few weeks ago.

This is a view from almost the same place taken Friday. It’s a view looking up the mountain. This particular location doesn’t have as much lower growth, so the view is less obstructed.

The leaves are so new some trees haven’t quite finished filling them out. The maples seem to be behind the oaks, with the hickories somewhere in between. But even the oak leaves are still soft. I cut a couple of chestnut oaks close to the house and within a half an hour the leaves had wilted like frozen lettuce.

Walking down the mountain in the cool of the morning with the birds singing somewhere out of sight is uplifting. It’s easy to understand why humans associate spring with rebirth.

Dogwoods are one of my favorite trees, and certainly my favorite of the understory trees. Every spring I’m almost surprised to see how many there are in the woods on the mountain. They aren’t nearly as noticeable after they bloom, and they’re almost invisible after the hardwoods leaf out.

I love to walk down Fouche Gap Road when the dogwoods are in bloom. To me, the white cloud-like puffs of blooms in the distance mean winter is really over.

We have several natives on our property, plus several we have planted or transplanted. This native dogwood has bloomed profusely in the past, but in the last few years it hasn’t done so much. This year is a pretty good year, although I expected even more. It’s visible from our kitchen.

We planted a white dogwood and a pink dogwood at the same time shortly after we moved in. Contrary to my expectations, the pink dogwood has done much better than the white one. This year it produced a decent bloom, but it still looks kind of sparse from a distance. It’s right at the end of our driveway.

Up close, the blooms are very nice.

There are several volunteers not far from the big white dogwood. If they all survive long enough, that part of the property is going to be a pretty sight in the spring.

Wayne identified the dead trees I mentioned in my post yesterday as eastern red cedar (juniperus virginiana). Once I read his comment, I realized I should have been able to figure that out. As I said, it didn’t occur to me because there are no large cedars nearby. There is, however, a large cedar about a hundred yards up the street that I have noticed on many occasions. Here it is.

Here is a closer view of the tree’s bark. If you compare it to the wood in the wheelbarrow from yesterday’s post, you can see the similarity.

Next to it is a dead cedar that looks amazingly like the ones on our property.

Although there are no large cedars nearby (assuming 100 yards is not nearby), there are several young cedars, like this one I can see every time I walk out onto our driveway.

How could that have escaped my notice? That’s Dusty perched in front of the little cedar. Maybe he could have helped with the tree identification.

When I walked the dogs this morning I looked for cedars. I saw two or three small ones, about the size of the one by our driveway, but no large cedars. The woods are wide open this time of year, so I am pretty sure I would have been able to identify a cedar if I had seen one in the woods.There must be other mature cedars around the mountain, but the one up the street is the only one I can specifically remember. I remember this one in particular because I don’t remember seeing any others.

I know where baby cedars come from, but I don’t really understand why the nearest mature cedar is so far from our young ones, and especially so far from the two or three I saw on our walk. Squirrels? Birds?

I went down Wildlife Trail later in the afternoon and looked up into our property. There are more dead cedars lying on the ground than I realized. I wonder how they died. Are cedars more susceptible to low-level fires than pines? If the fire that charred our loblolly and short-leaf pines also killed the cedars, it must have happened longer ago than I thought. I am going to have to assume that I can’t accurately estimate the timing of these events.

This also makes me wonder about what the forest looked like in the past. It’s mixed oak, hickory and pine now. I don’t think much if any of the mountain is virgin forest, and there are some large areas that have been cleared in recent decades. But based on the size of some of the trees along the road and not far from our property, much of the forest has been undisturbed for quite some time, especially on the steeper slopes. I’m guessing that logging ended in the early 1900’s, or possibly even in the late 1800’s (but we know how unreliable my time estimates are). The longleaf pines down Wildlife Trail give some evidence that in the more distant past there were larger stands of longleaf. I wonder how the cedars fit into this picture.