Dendrochronology

Do you have a special tree? What is it about your special tree makes it special to you?

I have had a few special trees. There was the large tree near the bank of the Huron River in Ann Arbor where I grew up. It was massive, and you could crawl up into its large crotch and be cradled. There was the huge pine tree at my elementary school that I climbed almost to the top. And there’s this one in the Fenner Arboretum that I have touch its bark whenever I walk by.

Humans have held trees and woods as sacred places for millennia. Western culture mainly sees trees as raw material to be exploited.

Do you remember Treebeard? Gandalf called him the oldest living thing that walks in Middle-earth. Treebeard was an Ent. (J.R.R Tolkien – The Two Towers) Trees are some of the oldest living things on the planet. There’s a bristlecone pine in California that is more than five thousand years old.

I think about ‘my’ tree. How it grew up from a little seedling. How many people have reached out and touched its bark, or looked up its trunk to the branches high above? What could it have ‘seen’ in its lifetime?

I suppose I think of trees differently than many people. My surname, Beer, derives from an Old English word, bearu, meaning grove or woods. In the West Country of English, where my grandfather was born, people have worshiped and revered trees. The Celts passed through that land on their way to Ireland, and of course, the Druids were there long before that. I wonder if that could explain my need to be amongst the trees.

As I reflect back, thinking of the times when I grew quickly, and those times that I didn’t. When life seemed easy, and when it was all I could do to hang on. I wonder if there’s some sort of metaphorical tree rings within me. Telling time from looking at the rings.

That gives you the word that is the title of this piece: dendrochronology. The scientific method of tree-ring dating.