I am no “tree lover”, but I do appreciate looking at an elderly tree, and imagining the history it has lived through.
There was a an enormous, fat, decaying maple tree around here that was 350 year old, and it just finally died. You couldn’t stand in front of it and not realize it had been a sapling long before the American Revolution.
But everything does have its time.
At our old family farmstead in Grey County, Ontario, my great grandfather planted maple trees to line the long driveway up to the farmhouse in about 1908. We’ve had to recently cut some down and buzz them up for firewood, but I took a piece of the trunk of one for myself and had an artisan fix it up with sanding and varnishing work so you can count the rings, neat.
In two hundred years, the replacement trees will be huge.
I have heard of thick forests, where each tree is somehow related to a “Mother Tree” or “Hub Tree”, producing an immense and sprawling organism that can cover acres of land.
One part will exchange nutrients with the other side, benefiting the whole.
Destruction or injury in one area of the offshoots is ‘communicated’ to all of the trees.
Same here.
Near my hometown, there was a gigantic lone cottonwood that was genuinely ancient when I first saw it. It was landmark enough that when you said "the big cottonwood out by..." the other person knew which one it was. It finally succumbed to the ravages of time a few years ago, and IIRC, they ring-dated it back into the 1800's... which isn't too shabby for a tree on that piece of prairie.
One of the things that surprises me is how young some trees actually are even though I had the impression that they are quite old. I have found aerial maps that show no trees where there is now a thick belt of woods containing trees I would swear date back to the early 20th Century, but they weren't there until the 1940's.
I used to have a maple like that in my back yard. It was big when I was but a pup. The new owners cut it down. Would like to have counted the rings.
But they’re keeping the wood and the many saplings, so the history will endure.
The maple must have been magnificent.
This was not far from my house. Druggie burned up a 3500 year-old tree.