Signs of the Season

by Susan Gibbs
Published: May 1, 2008

Horticulturists call them Cercis Canadensis, retailers them call them Eastern Redbuds, and some other folks call them Judas trees, Spicewood trees or forest pansies.
But perhaps a local singer and songwriter describes them best.
“Each spring they shout ‘Hooray!’ and burst into bloom,” says Stanardsville’s Judie Cox Pagter, who, with her husband Carl, leads the well-known string band Country Ham.
In fact, just one little Redbud might shout hello with more than 20,000 blooms before smothering itself with more tiny purple flowers - all in a single season.
It was in 1999 that the Redbuds shouted to Pagter.
A self-described farm girl, Pagter was raised on a small farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
As a young, struggling musician performing “in fire halls and at a lot of little fairs,” she kept a little five-acre farm with the “prettiest little home” she boarded horses, repaired saddles, sold Avon and bartered to support.
When she married, she followed her husband to his home in California.
“I sold my little mountain home and we bought the last existing horse set-up in Walnut Creek. We got the last acre,” Pagter explains. 
Even though Carl’s home was in the suburbs, with houses all around it, Pagter put a fence up and made herself a little farm.
“I had a chicken house built and kept rabbits and geese. I grew the biggest squash you’ve ever seen. I had my horses shipped out and rode the canyons.”
But the suburbs kept growing around her, fencing her in.
“The mountains kept calling me back, they wouldn’t let me go,” Pagter says.
“Out there, you couldn’t walk out and see a mountain without a house on it.”
She stayed put in Walnut Creek - which now has a population of 3,388 people per square mile—for nine years, riding the canyons, playing festivals, and flying home 12 times a year to see her family, staying sometimes for weeks, and eventually, telling Carl she needed some roots back East.
They bought a few properties in Virginia, among them a house in Preddy Creek that was built in 1772.
At that time, “There was nothing there but a little corner store.”
Then, one day, when she was sitting out on her swing, Pagter says, “I heard a bulldozer.
She got up, took up her pen and wrote her song, “Top of the Hill.”

Many times I have walked to the top of the hill,
To listen to birds while peaceful and still,
That something has happened it’s progress I hear,
The sound of machinery so distant so clear.

She heard about a small farm for sale on Bull Yearling Road at the base of the mountains. When she drove out to take a look-see the Redbuds shouted to her.
“It was beautiful. It was like Heaven. I went wild,” Pagter says.
“I called my husband and we ended up paying two mortgages for a year.”
Now, she keeps horses and geese, chickens and turkeys, pigeons and guinea hens among the Redbuds and Dogwoods at the little mountain home she has dubbed Deutsch Haven Farm.
Pagter’s folks are descendents of Germans who settled in Pennsylvania in the late 18th century.
They are farmers, who, Pagter says, raised hogs and chickens and “things that amounted to something.”
Redbud trees, Pagter says, amount to something: they speak to what is wonderful about life.