I walked in the deep woods this morning for the first time in months, there is still some snow up there. To mark the occasion – we love these woods (Petzval lens) I read a chapter from Peter Wohllenben’s wonderful book The Hidden Life Of Trees. Appropriately enough, I  turned to chapter ll, Trees Age Gracefully.

I can’t even count the number of truths about trees than I can relate to, I am a tree lover and a tree-hugger now. Wohllenben tell us that trees age like us, only at a different pace. As our hair thins, their crown thinks. They widen and add fat to help themselves against the cold. They get wrinkles, sometimes they are painful.

Trees, he says, are not capable of maintaining their mature height for long because its energy levels diminish slowly over the years (a tree ages much more slowly than humans, many live for hundreds of years.  At first, the tree can no longer manage to feed its topmost twigs, and these die off.

Just as an older person gradually loses body mass, so does an old tree. The next storm sweeps the dead twigs out of the crown, and after the cleanup, the tree looks a little fresher for awhile. The process is repeated each year, reducing the crown so gradually it is barely noticeable. Once all the topmost twigs and small branches are lost, only the thicker lower branches remain. Eventually, they die too, though they are not so easily dislodged.

The tree, like aging humans, can no longer hide its advanced age or infirmity. Fungi breaks down the barriers and invades the old tree, decomposing its skeleton and reducing it to powder.
“One day,” writes Wohlleben, “it’s all over. The trunk snaps and the tree’s life is at an end. “Finally,” you can almost hear the young trees-in-waiting sigh. In the years to come, they will quickly push their way up past the crumbling remains.”

Service to the forest doesn’t end when life ends for the tree, he adds. The rotting cadaver continues to support the ecosystem of the woods for hundreds of years.

I appreciate learning more about trees, and feel an ever deepening kinship with them. What a graceful way to age and die. I hope I get the chance to do the same. It’s time to love the earth and heal it. It is our only home.