An article in New Yorker magazine last year caught my eye with a reference to Maymont Park in the opening sentence. I had worked as program coordinator/pr person there in the late '70s, it's a wonderful place. Yet, to my dismay, it seems this was the birthplace of the blight you refer to and are trying to battle with these beetles. The more I read the more horrified I became. The Dooleys, who established this 105-acre estate, were importing trees from all over the world in 1903, before it was understood that these undomesticated creepy-crawleys coming aboard on the exotic specimens might find a foothold in new ecosystems and raise this havoc.
Is this scourge part of the reason Canadian forests are now giving off more CO2 than they absorb?Are the trees becoming so damaged and one might say, 'geriatric' that they are forced into that wierd kind of cycle?
I am so glad you all are there and doing this research. My husband and I spent our honeymoon at Mountain Lake and have returned many times over the years.
