Big old trees: worthy of respect and awe

WILD THINGS

A giant white pine. ED KANZE PHOTO

By ED KANZE

Most of us have an appreciation for big old trees. I’m not speaking of  merely large trees. I have in mind the gargantua, the titans, the behemoths, the blue whales of the vegetable kingdom. Big old trees, like big old people, are not always in the best of health, but who cares? 

They are survivors and worthy of respect and maybe a little awe. Survival over long periods requires good genes, good luck, a whole lot of get-up-and-go, and tenacity of a high order. Big old trees get to be big and old by facing the adversity that comes with every life and not giving up. Tenacity is a hallmark of big old people and medium-sized and small old people, too. 

I’ve never visited the Sierra Nevada and stood at the feet of giant sequoia, which rank among the most massive trees on Earth. Nor have I acquired a stiff neck trying to see to the tops of nearly 400-foot-tall coast redwoods along the rocky shores of California. But in Tasmania, Australia, I’ve gaped dumbstruck at massive eucalyptus trees 300 feet tall, felt dizzy pondering the astounding girth (historically, perhaps up to 88 feet in circumference) of kauri trees on the North Island of New Zealand, and genuflected at the bases of New York state’s tallest trees, white pines over 150 feet from top to bottom, in the Adirondacks. Yet to be appreciated and worth meeting, big old trees don’t have to be the biggest and the oldest. They just have to be extra-extra-large and have a lot of miles racked up on their odometers.

While I was growing up in the middle of Westchester County, a massive white ash tree stood in our back yard and a substantial sugar maple loomed over the front. In hindsight, these trees probably weren’t particularly big or old, but they seemed enormous and ancient to me. The term “tree hugger” carries unpleasant connotations in some circles, but believe me, there’s no harm in hugging a tree. Try it sometime. You probably already have. Try it again. Feel the strength and the solidity and sense all those layers of wood partly encircled by your arms, layers built up one challenging growing season at a time. 

Contemplate, too, that while humans have vascular systems, with an array of pipes that we call arteries and veins transporting blood and all that it carries throughout our bodies, trees are vascular beings, too. One of the reasons a great many of them live far longer than we do is that while we accumulate fatty deposits in our vascular systems that eventually compromise efficiency or entirely shut down flow, trees simply grow a new layer of vascular tissue every year. The outer layers, the tubes that remain active, are called sapwood. The inner layers, which have been retired from service, are called “wood.” 

Friends and I recently paid a visit to a grove of huge white pines. I don’t know the size of the trees, but they towered over the forest floor like the giant Saturn V rockets that during my youth launched astronauts toward the moon. They made us feel tiny, and it was a good feeling. In a sense, these and other big trees are also reaching for the moon. Every year, they grow a little taller. If in 2026 the world’s tallest plant is, as biologists reckon, 381 feet tall, then how tall will the world’s tallest plants be in a hundred million years? Humans aren’t the only living things eager to venture into the universe.