Survivors

Natural History, Feb, 2002 by Ellen Goldensohn

When I was a child, my family lived on the southeastern outskirts of Denver, then a relatively small city just beginning its sprawl onto the Great Plains. The land was flat and treeless except for the occasional streamside cottonwood. We planted an elm in our backyard. Rain was a rarity, so the elm had to be watered regularly. It grew tall and skinny above the sparse grass, and its narrow canopy of leaves provided little shade.

We moved back east to northern New Jersey when I was eleven, and I delighted in the change of vegetative scene. The woods near our home were thick with walnut, white oak, sweet birch, sassafras, hemlock, red maple, juniper, tulip trees, and many more species I couldn't name. In summer their branches were mantled in wild grape and honeysuckle and other, more mysterious vines. To my young eyes, this was a jungle. A forest primeval.

In college I learned that the woods I loved were not primeval at all but mostly second or third growth--a community of trees that had come up in land once cleared for farming or logging but later abandoned. Really old trees, I was told, were giants, found only in places like California, Washington, and Alaska.

But as David Stahle explains in "The Unsung Ancients" (page 48), stands of truly venerable trees can be seen all around the United States--if you know where to look. Some have been spared simply because their timber is without commercial value; others because they thrive where farmers and loggers, charcoal makers and real estate developers couldn't or wouldn't go. In some places, writes Stahle, these unsung ancients--beeches in the Ozarks, bald cypresses in the Carolinas, hemlocks near the Canadian border--still dominate the local landscape. Many have survived all that has happened to the land since 1492, and as dendrochronologists like Stahle can attest by studying growth rings, a few were witnesses to much that came before.