Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993 TAG: 9303200336
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
STORM VICTIM'S LEGACY: RESTORING A SPECIES TO LIFE
If all goes well, sometime in the next year or two, young round-leaf birches near Sugar Grove in Southwest Virginia will start to pollinate each other.The trees, 15 to 20 feet tall, will produce seeds that will eventually grow to new birches.
Virginia Tech researchers believe it will be first restoration of an endangered tree species in the United States - and perhaps the world.
It will be one of the legacies of Peter Feret - a scientist and teacher whose last name was derived from the French word for forest.
Feret, 48, died last weekend of an apparent heart attack while shoveling snow. He was one of at least nine people who died in Western Virginia during the blizzard that savaged the Eastern United States.
Feret was a vigorous man who was always busy - in the lab, in the classroom, in the field, at home and in the community.
His friend and Virginia Tech colleague, David W. Smith, remembers him this way: "Always had a smile on his face. Always going someplace with things to do. That was Pete: a man with a mission."
Feret came to Tech as an assistant professor in 1970 and worked his way up to become full professor and chairman of research and graduate studies for the university's forestry program.
The people who knew him say he had an amazing ability for juggling many things at once.
He was a prime mover in the creation of a full-fledged College of Forestry and Wildlife Resources at Tech. He was the university arborist, advising Tech's groundskeepers on the care of the campus' trees and plants. He was a founder of the Virginia Urban Forestry Council.
He also made time for family and community activities: digging post holes for a new town playground, loading bundles of recycled newspapers for the school band boosters, serving a term as president of his kids' swim club.
"He never would push back and say, `That's enough,'" his wife Alice said. "He would just see it through."
Feret, a native of New York, earned his Ph.D in plant breeding and genetics at the University of Wisconsin.
His knowledge as a geneticist made him a crucial player in the effort to save the round-leaf birch.
The tree was first discovered growing along a creek in Smyth County in 1914. Six decades later, it was thought to be a dead species and was placed on the federal government's extinct species list. Then, in 1975, a young biologist discovered a stand of 40 of them growing along Cressy Creek near Sugar Grove.
But they were dying off - down to 18 by the mid-1980s, with only four seed-producing adults.
Feret's work on the trees' genetics made it possible for foresters to grow seedlings at Tech's Reynolds Homestead research station in Patrick County.
Feret and other foresters made 20 plantings of 100 trees each in the Sugar Grove area. They also sent seedlings to 150 arboretums across the United States and Europe.
Today, the trees they planted at Sugar Grove are about 8 years old. The round-leaf birch is in the process of being "downlisted" from "endangered" to "threatened."
Alice Feret said her husband's love for the outdoors started when he was a kid. He worked summers, sunup to sundown, at a plant nursery.
He could identify perhaps 20 birds by their songs. When the first robin of 1993 landed on their street in Blacksburg, he spotted it a neighbor's bush and said, "Alice, look." She marked it down on their calendar: Feb. 7.
Family vacations meant camping and hiking for Peter, Alice and their children, Andrea, 13, Matthew, 17, and Peter Jr., 20. "We always did the natural things," Alice Feret said. "We've seen every national park in the continental U.S. He could throw up a tent and make it all seem so simple, wherever we went."
Richard Kreh, senior research associate at the Reynolds Homestead, said Feret was a great scientist and scholar, but he also loved to get his hands dirty in the field.
"Periodically, I'd get the call from him: `I'm coming to Reynolds today.' It'd be a whirlwind visit . . . He'd always say to me: `I really feel refreshed after coming down here.'"
On one project, Feret and Kreh spent days climbing up and down 70-foot-high scaffolds, studying the flowers on oak trees. They actually counted every acorn, finding that in a good year a single big oak could produce hundreds of thousands of acorns.
When the owners of the Oaks Bed & Breakfast Inn in Christiansburg decided to try to save seven three-century-old oaks on their property, they turned to Feret.
He gave Tom and Margaret Ray advice on caring for the sick trees. He helped them get a federal grant to start the preservation process. And he germinated their acorns to produce seedlings to scatter around the yard.
"He came over here I don't know how many times," Margaret Ray said. "He had this way of walking around your property. He would point all these things out. He had an incredible connection with growing things."
One of the oaks, which is 350 to 400 years old, may be the oldest in Virginia.
The seedlings that Feret was growing in the university nursery will be ready for planting this spring. "He loved the oak trees so much we might just be able to name some of them after Peter," Ray said.
Somehow, with all his projects, Peter Feret never seemed frazzled.
"He was not a workaholic in any sense of the word," Alice Feret said. "What he did, he did with intensity that left time around the edges." Time for his family. For reading the stack of books and magazines beside his bed. And, just before his death, for planning to take lessons to resurrect his skills on the piano.
"He could sleep like a log," Alice Feret said. "He had a steady evenness, a confidence that we could work it out. It was a reassuring strength."
Smith, who worked with Feret for two decades, said Feret had a "work ethic, a thought ethic. . . . He loved what he did."
If he didn't know how to do something, he'd learn how.
"He thrived on trying to solve problems," Smith said. "You could argue with him and still be his friend. You could disagree with him and still be his friend. And you could agree with him and still be his friend. Hell, I'm just plain gonna miss the man."