For 3,000 years, the source of silk — shimmering, luxurious and terribly expensive — was a closely guarded secret. Silk worms, it’s lucrative little spinners, were kept jealously hidden by the silk makers of China on pain of death.

But today, 8,000 miles and a few millenia from ancient China, the very same worms are readying to produce another crop of precious silk, still one of the most pricey and sought after fibers on the market today.

Cassie Dickson has a tray of them sitting serenely on her dining room table in Sylva, munching on mulberry leaves, the sole diet of the Bombyx mori, the legendary variety of silk worms responsible for producing the lion’s share of the world’s silk.

“I have emergency trees, I have trees everywhere,” says Dickson. “I can spot trees just driving down the road.”

She’s been rearing the insects herself for 21 years now, after a magazine article piqued her interest.

She’d always been interested in handcrafts and fibers; she got traditional weaving and fiber spinning in the 1970s, and today she weaves historical pieces that have found their way into museums and private collections alike.

So she wrote to the woman featured in the article and got a response — along with some silkworm eggs as well.

She hatched them, and now she travels the region, giving out eggs and advice of her own.

The cardboard tray is teeming with a hundred or so worms, which are really more akin to caterpillars, with their knobbly bodies and tiny, sticky feet that make the sound of gently falling rain as they patter over the mulberry leaves.

In their short, month-long run as worms, they’ll grow to 10,000 times their original size, ballooning up from tiny eggs that are no larger than a grain of sand.

They don’t venture out of their cardboard homes, says Dickson, until it’s time to spin, when the fattened worms begin to get antsy for a dark, secluded place to create the hard, oblong cocoons that can eventually be turned into everything from couture eveningwear to wire insulation.

It takes more than just a few worms, however, to get to the prêt-à-porter phase. According to Dickson, it takes 1,000 cocoons to make an average-size ladies’ blouse, which might be why the gossamer threads are so costly. Each two-inch worm will produce one single filament that’s anywhere from 500 yards to a mile long, and it takes around 48 filaments to spin into a single silk thread.

Dickson, though, says she uses the fiber not only for spinning into yarn and thread, but also raw, unraveled and pulled from a cocoon.

Purchased from a factory, raw silk comes in thin, translucent squares that are unraveled from the hardened cocoons that have been softened in water. But rather than spin these, Dickson often just knits this silk straight from its original state, simply pulling it by hand to the desired thickness or space dying it with natural dyes or even Kool-Aid.

That’s a technique she takes into workshops and schools, to demonstrate how versatile the fiber can be.

“The boys always go, ‘that looks like fish bait to me,’” laughs Dickson, but her worms and their products have always proven pretty popular with kids and adults in her classes and workshops.

And, she says, while the month of raising the worms is very labor intensive, she’s never had a problem hatching the eggs, which she keeps dormant in her refrigerator for much of the year.

This year’s herd has about another week before they begin to branch out and spin themselves into their fibrous shells. And for most of them, that’s the end of the line. The majority of the blind, flightless moths that would naturally emerge from the cocoon will never see the light of day, as their chrysalis damages the silk threads. But Dickson will select a few of the most choice cocoons and let them emerge to lay next year’s eggs — “sort-of my selective breeding,” she says — while the others will be stifled, heated slightly to prevent their exit.

Today, most of the silk used in the U.S. comes from China, still a powerhouse in the industry it founded so many thousands of years ago. While domestic production has seen spikes throughout American history, large-scale sericulture died out in the 1930s, thanks to the Great Depression.

But the age-old tradition is alive in places like Western North Carolina, where natural fibers and natural textile techniques are seeing a new vogue. And the secret of silk is still hatching and spinning, year after year, as Dickson passes on eggs and expertise to a new crowd of silk spinners.

A new and long-awaited Creative Arts Building is only days away from its groundbreaking ceremony at Haywood Community College. But the tree clearing undertaken to prepare the way for the new crafts center has proven less-than-popular with some of the school’s forestry students.

Andy Fitzsimmons, a student in the college’s nationally recognized forestry program, said he’s lamenting the loss of trees that have been used as teaching tools for the school’s natural resources programs.

“There were some trees in there that had been there for a very long time, there were some that were just starting to sprout up,” said Fitzsimmons. “I feel like it just takes away learning tools from other departments.”

The college says that the trees in question had to go in order to make way for contractors to begin work. Some students were also displeased by the way the plants were taken out — dozed over rather than cut.

“They just seemed to go in there with tractors and push trees over, they didn’t even saw a lot of the trees,” said Jeremy Graves, a recent forestry graduate. “Even if they were going to proceed at that site, they could’ve taken their time and allowed the students to go in there and fell the trees. That would’ve been an excellent teaching opportunity for students that are still in the program.”

Debbie Trull, the school’s executive director of administration, said that the college really did everything in its power to fell the trees properly, making sure they were still useable either for firewood or to be milled and reused as flooring in the school’s new research house.

As for using students in the removal process, Trull said the idea was broached by the architect and discussed at the school, but because of a logging accident that happened there in 1982, the decision was made that letting students cut the trees was too dangerous.

“Where they get the opportunity to practice with their chainsaws is in their operating-a-chainsaw class,” said Trull, adding that they did use forestry students to mark the trees that were appropriate for removal before uprooting them.

Some students, however, see the bare and leveled patch of land as an eyesore and blemish on the face of their famously beautiful campus.

“It’s supposed to be an arboretum,” said Graves. “People come from all over to see the school, to walk through there and see the plants and wildlife. I think it kind-of goes against what the school claims to promote and I think it’s a big eyesore for the campus.”

Dae-Won Koh, the project manager for the building and vice president of Innovative Designs, the project’s lead architect, said that they’ve actually planned for the removal of as few trees as possible. In fact, said Koh, the amount of trees left on the site is going to be a greater challenge for the contractor, but they felt it was important to save as much of the surrounding flora as possible.

The contract for the $8.3 million building, which will house the college’s well-known professional crafts programs, was just awarded to Miles-McClellan Construction. The groundbreaking is scheduled for March 6, after which construction on the 41,665-square-foot, environmentally friendly building will begin in earnest.

By the time construction is finished, said Koh, the school is planning to replant two trees for every tree that was removed, which will be reflected in his final landscape plan.

In fact, he said, though the decision to cut down larger, older trees might not be as aesthetically pleasing or popular as removing smaller ones, research done by his firm has shown that it will go further towards reducing the building’s carbon footprint.

“The reason that we supported the college’s decision on planting new trees two-to-one is because when they [the trees] are old, their photosynthesis is quite low compared to the young trees,” said Koh. “If you plant new, young trees, they have to grow so fast, the contribution to the environment is the greater.”

Trull said that the school has taken all these things into consideration and has tried to make the most eco-friendly decisions for the site.

“There is a landscape plan and we worked within that contract as we could and with the department of natural resources as much as we could to do everything correctly,” said Trull.

Even so, the naked patch that now features in the center of an otherwise-green campus still doesn’t sit well with some who prize the school for its natural beauty and want to keep it that way.

“It’s an area of natural space that’s destroyed, it’s gone,” said Graves. “To drive by there and see it, it just hurts.”