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The Last Man at Sunny Ridge: William Wiley and the World of J. Russell Smith
At ninety-two, William Wiley is one of the last people who can tell it first-hand. Born in 1933, he grew up on the mountain farms of J. Russell Smith — the geographer whose 1929 classic Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture helped seed the entire agroforestry movement — and spent his boyhood grafting, budding, and shipping trainloads of chestnut, persimmon, hickory, and honey locust out of Smith's Sunny Ridge Nursery near Round Hill, Virginia.
In this conversation, recorded at the Taylor farm alongside Zach Elfers of Future Forest Plants and William's son Rob, we go after the things the history…
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