Home › The Lives of Trees and the Lives of Men: February › The Lives of Trees and the Lives of Men: February: California

The Lives of Trees and the Lives of Men: February: California

They do. And some of the diaries of old trees reach back for centuries; are older, much older, than Franklin's autobiography or the famous diary of Mr. Pepys that you hear so much about in the history of English literature. I know of one tree diary kept by an old resident of California, who is still hale and hearty at the age of two thousand or so, reaching clear back to 245 A.D. In this diary he tells about one of the California forest-fires that occurred that year and caused him some loss of property. He belongs to the famous Sequoia family, who think nothing, you know, of living a thousand years; and often go far beyond that!

The way in which a tree enters the record of a fire in its diary is this: when a living tree is injured, but not destroyed, by fire this fire may kill or burn away part of the outer bark, the inner bark, and the bole. When such scars are formed the tree at once tries to cover them with new wood, very much as new skin forms over an injury to your hand. The new wood grows from the living edges of the inner bark toward the centre of the wound until it completely covers it. The date of the fire can be told by counting the yearly rings that have formed in the wood growing over the scar. In the case of fire, the wood is charred. If the injury is due to lightning or to the breaking off of a limb by the wind or to insects or to fungous growths, this strange diary tells it; for all these kinds of injuries leave their characteristic marks. READS LIKE A DETECTIVE STORY!