Moneta, Virginia

Moneta sits in rolling country on the east side of the Blue Ridge, in Bedford County, and Smith Mountain Lake shapes most of the tree care here. The lake is man made. The Roanoke River was dammed at Smith Mountain and the water backed up into every hollow and creek bed behind it. That is why the shoreline folds in and out the way it does, cove after cove, and why so many lots run downhill to the water instead of sitting level beside it.

Much of the ground around Moneta was open farm and pasture before it was anything else, and land like that grows back in a set order. Broomsedge and briars come first. Eastern red cedar and Virginia pine crowd in after them, usually along the old fence lines, and oak, hickory and tulip poplar come up underneath and take over later. You can still read that history on a lot of properties. A line of cedars running through the middle of the woods almost always marks a fence somebody kept clear a long time ago.

How a tree grew matters more than how old it is. A tree that came up in the open kept its low limbs and spread wide, so it carries heavy horizontal wood a long way out from the trunk. A tree that came up in the woods grew tall and thin, shed its lower limbs, and leaned on the trees around it for shelter the whole time. Take those neighbors out for a view or a house pad and the thin one is suddenly holding the wind by itself, which is the one most likely to fail in the next few years.

None of that means every tree on a lake lot is trouble. It means a tree that grew in the open and a tree that grew in a crowd need different answers, and around Moneta that difference is usually easy to see once somebody points it out.