CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Perry Mann turned 92 on March 12 overseeing the planting of a pink dogwood at his home in Hinton. Nearby a venerable old dogwood (Cornus florida) of the same coloration sported hundreds of buds along with many withering branches.

"Who's older, you or that dogwood?" I asked Perry.

"I don't know," he replied. "We are both showing signs of decay."

He lives near his law office where he still works with his daughter Amy Mann. He is challenged to maintain his balance on his daily walks to the Post Office and bank and over a bridge on the New River. He writes less frequently than his many readers would wish, but keeps up his reading of current affairs and books, at the moment, Jon Meacham's "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power."

The tree planting anticipated his column "Drama of a Spring Day.". Now there is a perceptible alteration. A pink glow envelopes the mountains and here and there an upstart exhibits a glimmer of chartreuse, which is upstaged by the earliest white of the service tree. In town the dogwoods are having their day displaying splendiferous trees of flowering pinks.

With a watering of compost tea, the young Cornus florida (var. "Rubra") settled into the yard a respectful distance from the old dogwood. The elder got its share of the compost tea and some mulch as well. It will serve out its time above ground as slowly and surely as its owner. I hope that with the care we gave it, Perry still outlasts it and sees the newcomer assume that niche overlooking the New River.

Mann has long enjoyed the companionship of trees. Every boy has a special place in the woods. It is a place where trees are a canopy under which there is a floor of cushiony decayed foliage and moss and there are all about rocks lichen covered. Nearby there is a spring from which a boy can have a draft of clear coolness by moving away leaves, waiting until it's clear and drinking with cupped hands or face down. Take away the trees and the spot is nothing to boys or birds or anything.

Over the years, I have watched eroded land become productive again by trees. First, there came the locusts and pines. Then after years of growth and foliage waste from those trees, the land became fertile enough to sustain hardwoods. Then, came the oaks and maples. The evolutionary process was repeated. Nature heals manmade sores.

We rode down New River to observe the new construction of the Parkway and the ancient engineering of the river. We saw a kingfisher and a huge bald eagles' nest on an island. He marveled at the "antiseptic green" of winter water crashing over Brooks and Sandstone Falls. Austere flatrock plant communities edged and enormous oaks overlooked the cascades.

I read once that lumbermen felled a white oak in Pickaway, Monroe County, which was six feet in diameter at the stump and from it came 3,000 board feet of lumber and seven cords of wood. I grieved a bit over this. The thought of such a tree being cut seemed a sin. And it seems to me a sin that, of the thousands of such trees once here, there is scarcely one that has escaped the ax and the saw. Will there come a time when a boy cannot find a spot in the woods that he knows in his genes is the place for him to plan and play?

To Perry Mann, the felling of that specimen is only symbolic of our near-universal short-sightedness. The fierce urgency of now is recognize that humanity is on the Titanic. The iceberg is the mindless procreation of more people, the prodigal use of the earth's resources, the creation and frenetic consumption of stuff, the maldistribution of wealth, the daily indignity of dumping tons of trash and the maintenance of an economic system of whose dogmas build a bigger iceberg day by day. He survives to bear witness and sound alarm.

Chanlett, of Hinton, is a small farmer, landscaper and friend of occasional Sunday Gazette-Mail contributor Perry Mann.