MORGANTOWN — It was a sun-dappled, 43-degree Thursday at the Core Arboretum, and Heather Smith was out among the old-growth trees with her clipboard.
She was working.
Smith, a U.S. Forest Service botanist based in Morgantown, was cataloging all the wildflowers that will make their seasonal debut, of sorts, on Sunday.
That’s when the spring wildflower walks, an annual tradition, begin at the 91-acre expanse, which is tucked down behind the WVU Coliseum, in Evansdale.
Sunday’s walk — the weekend’s predicted snow or no — will be at 2 p.m.
Other wildflower walks are also scheduled for the next two Sundays this month.
In the meantime, Smith declared the place Arboretum-ready on Thursday.
“Everything’s there that’s supposed to be there,” she said, smiling.
Smith has been in West Virginia with the U.S. Forest Service for the past 18 years.
She knows all about heavily wooded areas. Smith hails from Maine, which, as she observed wryly, is even more about towering stands of trees than it is all those Stephen King novels.
“This is a good place,” she said, while the sounds of nearby traffic on Patteson Drive and University Avenue sonically peeked through the branches.
“There’s such a diversity of plant life here.”
Diversity, indeed.
Last year’s walks showcased nearly 50 species of ephemeral wildflowers, said Zach Fowler, the Core Arboretum’s director.
“You need to come out and see the beautiful things happening here,” he said.
Fowler is also a WVU biology professor who has been known to hold classes at the arboretum. Other professors do the same.
As a kid, he spent every minute he could outdoors, in the hills and hollows of his native Tyler County.
He said he tosses up a thank you to Earl L. Core, the arboretum’s namesake, for every day he gets to work there.
Core, who died in 1984, was a respected botanist and chairman of biology at WVU in 1948, when the university bought the Krepps and Dille family farms to establish the Evansdale campus.
He quickly began lobbying for the preservation of a parcel of that expanse, which would become the arboretum that would eventually bear the fruit of his name.
“Yeah, he pretty much jumped on that,” Fowler said.
In the postwar boom of those heady years, Core, his 21st-century contemporary Fowler said, knew the importance of preserving green spaces in areas that were quickly being bulldozed into urban spaces.
“You’re looking at a chunk of old-growth forest,” Fowler said.
“It’s easily accessible, because it’s all here in town. That’s what makes it unique. This place is a treasure.”
