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I walked the mile from Leister Farm, where Meade headquartered the union army, through a wooded tangle of wild honeysuckle on Culp’s Hill down to Spangler’s Spring, where the ancestor of an Amity family at the center of my reporting, the Haneys, had fought on the side of the south.

Finding one, I’d stroll its winding streets, and I’d admire the houses set back in woods, with moths orbiting porch lights, the smell of wild honeysuckle, and the tic–tic–tic of midnight sprinklers.

He foraged for ingredients for his own concoctions: wild honeysuckle from the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn; honey from his neighbor’s backyard hives.

It wants to hold the trees—“Persimmons ... Hornbeam ... Gum-trees, both sweet and sour”—and the blossoms, especially the most wild—“wild honeysuckle, wild roses ... wild geranium”—and even the “friendly weeds” of its author’s daily strolls: “snakeroot ... dandelions ... bloodroot.”

Among all the beautiful things, there was one to rivet the eye and attention; a dark green fir tree, perhaps thirty feet high, around whose trunk and branches a wild honeysuckle vine had twined itself from the ground to the topmost twig.