Oldest, best... tree!

Longleaf pines and why they matter

I’ve been in Southern Pines this week, working on a book project at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, which explains the lack of a Tuesday post.

Weymouth, a big old rambling beautiful mansion (that some people say is haunted!), was built in the early 1900s by a wealthy family who wanted to preserve a tract of longleaf pine forests—important ecosystems that once spanned millions of acres across the Southeastern United States. Beyond the house’s gardens, there is a 165-acre public park with hiking and horse trails through one hundred acres of old-growth forest. This forest is a part of the historic homelands of the Lumbee and Skaruhreh/Tuscarora (North Carolina) people.

Walking there, I was struck by the differences between the landscape at home (only an hour north) and here: the soil is sand instead of clay, carpeted with long, soft pine needles and canopied by the glinting pine boughs. It’s beautiful! The forest floor is also dotted with the biggest, most perfect pine cones:

Another amazing thing I learned is that this tract of forest harbors the oldest longleaf pine tree in the world. According to scientists at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the tree is 473 years old. Here’s what Frank Graff, producer at UNC-TV, wrote in 2019 about the tree:

When its seed was just starting to germinate in 1548, Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel. The tree was already almost 60 years old when settlers arrived in Jamestown and colonists began moving west.

Those settlers were chopping down trees as they moved. For some reason, this tree was spared from the settlers’ ax as well as countless storms.

In the 1960s, the Nature Conservancy helped protect the area, knowing the trees were old… but not how old. The land was eventually made part of the preserve, which now covers 915 acres in the Sandhills region near Southern Pines.

Besides the towering longleaf pines, the area preserves and restores a portion of the unique longleaf pine community. That includes broad expanses of wiregrass and a host of rare species, including the red-cockaded woodpecker, pine barrens tree frog, bog spicebush, fox squirrel and myriad wildflowers. But just imagine if that one tree could talk.

Imagine! I’m sure that I saw the tree, because I walked the trail it’s on several times and looked at every single pine, but it’s hard to tell exactly which one is older than Shakespeare, because they’re all pretty majestic. (And it’s not marked, because… Americans.) The conservation of the forest, and the trails themselves, also reminded me of this book, which I am reading in galleys:

You can read an excellent op-ed, The Road to Climate Recovery Goes through the Wild Woods, from the authors, John Reid and Thomas Lovejoy, for a window into their work on the urgent need to end deforestation. I’m learning a lot from Ever Green about the climate-cooling impact of the world’s major undisrupted forests: the Taiga, the North American boreal, the Amazon, the Congo, and the island forest of New Guinea. Much of the Southeast’s longleaf pine forest is gone now, but it was (and in places, is) a crucial ecosystem too (read more about these forests, and the plants and animals they harbor, in Janisse Ray’s wonderful Ecology of a Cracker Childhod).

I think I may bring Beatrice back here to figure out which one is the actual oldest tree. I’m pretty sure she could tell.

Happy Friday, Frog Troublers!