By Felicity Barringer
Published: MONDAY, MAY 9, 2005

FAIRMONT, West Virginia: Alan Lockwood hefted his ginseng hoe from beside the fireplace of his mountain home and demonstrated how he edges the blade beneath a root and gently lifts it to the surface.

He was making a smaller version of his favorite hoe, with a haft of ash and a tip the size of a matchbook, for his 5-year-old grandson.

But Lockwood, 51, a ginseng hunter and dealer, was not sure what there would be for the boy to harvest.

The data about wild ginseng, a protected species, is sketchy. But this much is sure: The deer eat the leaves, a problem quantified in a recent study; wild turkeys eat the seeds; timber companies and suburban developments take over the land and cut the trees that provide shade for it to grow.

People across Appalachia harvest the wild root.

The best ginseng roots - those with the elongated neck of a Giacometti sculpture, a few twisting rootlets at the bottom and the general aspect of a wizened gnome - can sell for more than $100 apiece. Run-of-the-mill roots go for $300 or more a pound, or $660 a kilogram, in the booming Asian market.

In China, wild ginseng is prized as a source of focus, vitality and well-being. In Appalachia, from the time of the 18th-century frontiersman Daniel Boone, it has been a prized source of income.

Some ginseng hunters and dealers, known as wildcrafters or 'sangers by the mountain people, fret that the diminishing supply may curtail their long-established practice - and perhaps the economic benefits that the root has brought to many impoverished areas.

Cultivated versions of the root are abundant but lack the economic or backwoods appeal. Lockwood said that if ginseng root is not gathered by heads-down foraging farinto the maples, it is not really wild ginseng.

"I don't want to have a Disney World show where you go and dig ginseng and mushrooms," he said.

Circumstances are not promising. From the biology department of nearby West Virginia University to state agriculture researchers in Quicksand, Kentucky, and beyond into North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there are indications of a slow but steady decline in the wild-ginseng harvest, though the extent and causes are matters of dispute.