Disease Taking Heavy Toll on Dogwoods : Trees: Spreading down from New England, a fungus is wiping out a regional symbol of spring in the South.

Silvery eddies gleamed in Bent Creek 1,000 feet below, while overhead a hawk rode an updraft in the sunshine. But as Bob Anderson paused on a steep trail in Pisgah National Forest to take in nature’s show, something was missing, perhaps forever.

“Dogwoods have been growing here and apparently quite happy for 50 years,” said Anderson, a U.S. Forest Service plant pathologist, who had stopped in a stand of sickly looking trees, their branches hung with dry leaves. “Now they’re dead.”

Only a few years ago in Southern highlands like these--and in mountains up to New England--millions of dogwood blossoms made bright white brush strokes everywhere on the gold-green canvas of the April woods, a guarantee of spring.

Now a killer disease, dogwood anthracnose, spreading unstoppably southward has eliminated the annual display in large parts of the Appalachian region. Virtually all flowering dogwoods in the national park that surrounds the presidential retreat Camp David in Maryland, for example, have died.

Scientists despair for vulnerable dogwoods in the wild. “In the mountains, we’re in deep trouble,” said Keith Langdon, a researcher in the hard-hit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina line.

“In the higher elevations, there’s going to be millions, probably even billions, of dogwoods that are going to die,” agreed Anderson, a leader of a task force monitoring the blight and coordinating efforts to slow it.

At the same time, however, researchers and others are working to counter worries, which they call baseless, that all flowering dogwoods are doomed.

This fear, spreading with the relentless disease, has hurt the nursery industry in the South, where dogwood-growing is a $100-million-a-year business.

Larry Edwards, a Mooresville, N.C., nursery owner who normally grows 20,000 dogwoods a year, has cut production for the first time. Recently, he showed a visitor through greenhouses still crowded with more than 4,000 budding trees, inventory that a few years ago would have been sold by Christmas.

“At times, our sales have been off as much as 50% to 60% on the wholesale end,” Edwards said. How much have lost sales cost him? “I’d say you’d be looking at . . . $75,000, $100,000 just in my own operation.”

The industry, joining with government and environmental groups, has launched a public education campaign to show that dogwoods, a longtime favorite for landscaping, can thrive with proper care.

Thousands of copies of slickly reproduced, easy-to-read research summaries--including one headlined “There’s Hope for Dogwoods”--are being distributed through garden shops and extension service offices.

The research notes that well-maintained landscape trees are less vulnerable than those in the mountains, especially if planted in sunny spots where temperatures reach 95 degrees during part of the year.

Preventive maintenance involves mulching, fertilizing, watering, pruning, and in certain cases spraying trees with fungicides. “If people follow those steps they can save their trees,” Anderson said.

“I just want people to know that dogwoods aren’t doomed,” said Edwards, a board member of the Southern Nurserymen’s Assn. “Here, everybody grew up with dogwoods.”

Indeed, in the South the disease has attacked a regional symbol.

The dogwood is the state flower of Virginia and North Carolina, the state tree of Missouri. The cross-shaped blossom has a religious significance that’s cited every Easter in many Southern churches. And cities and towns across Dixie welcome spring with dogwood festivals.

The two-week Dogwood Arts Festival in Knoxville, which opened April 12 , generated $12 million last year and attracted 250,000 visitors. Sixty miles of streets have been designated “dogwood trails” for their bursting white and pink blossoms.

“Other than some UT (University of Tennessee) football games, we draw more people in than anything else,” said Chip Scott, spokesman for the festival.

Despite Knoxville’s proximity to the badly hit Smoky Mountains, dogwood anthracnose hasn’t harmed the city’s trees, he said. “It has put fear in people that they’re going to lose their trees and slowed down replanting.”

In Atlanta, also home of a showcase dogwood festival , there are signs of worry, too.

The environmentalist group Trees Atlanta gave away dogwood seedlings at the city’s flower show this spring, but some people declined them, voicing concern about anthracnose. Most were reassured--and took the seedlings--after Trees Atlanta explained that carefully tended dogwoods in urban yards could be protected, said the group’s Steve Crawford.

Dogwood anthracnose, caused by a fungus called Discula , was discovered in 1978 in New York, and almost simultaneously in Washington state, where it spread among the Pacific dogwood and has since been found in Oregon and Idaho.

In the East, the disease killed the flowering dogwood, Cornus florida , first in the New England and mid-Atlantic states.

Plant pathologists found that the fungus thrives in cool, moist areas, especially at elevations of 2,000 feet or more.

They wondered if the disease would halt in the warmer South. The answer came in 1987 when dogwoods were found dying by the thousands in north Georgia’s Cohutta Wilderness and around Cashiers, N.C.

In 1988, 48 counties in the South were infected; 1989, 90 counties; in 1990, 126 counties in seven Southern states. Those states--Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia--joined Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia as places where the disease was found.

Effective fungicides are available, but impractical in the wild. “There’s just no way we could do that,” said Mark Windham, a University of Tennessee plant pathologist.

Sprayed from planes, fungicides would be intercepted by taller trees and could harm fish, he said.

Other creatures, meanwhile, will suffer from the blight itself. Forty-two species of birds rely on dogwood berries in the fall as a “high-energy food source,” Windham said, and deer forage on its leaves in spring.

Without spraying, the wild dogwood may have to save itself, researchers said. The epidemic mysteriously skips certain trees, even in the high-risk uplands, and scientists hope some may have a natural resistance.

“That’s our best bet,” Windham said, “finding a resistant tree and propagating it.”

Back in the woods, Anderson voiced the same hope. He told of a 15-mile trail up to Mt. Pisgah, where he hiked just a few years ago amid a profusion of blossoms but now finds only dying dogwoods.

Sadder still in a way, the barren branches, the brown slopes, offer no reminder for passersby who never saw the blooms.

“They drive through here and think, ‘Oh well, that hillside never had dogwoods,”’ Anderson said. “They don’t realize that it used to.”