If you're not a high elf, your faction may indeed be too low - recipes are faction-driven now. If you *are* a high elf, I seem to recall Silius saying something back before the end of beta about certain recipes needing faction even if you *are* a local - the bow recipe for artificers, for instance.
On the bright side, doing work orders raises that pretty quickly. I just hope we don't need thousands of faction points for basic items.
As for the treants - they're a great source of wood in the LN area generally, which in my experience is otherwise poorer in wood than other places (e.g. the Lomshir area). I've only hit the level 9 ones south of LN so far.