Review: In Search of the Old Ones

 In Search of the Old Ones

An Odyssey Among Ancient Trees

By Anthony D Fredericks

What a lovely, lovely book!  One of the best natural history books I’ve ever read. He travels around to visit the old trees of the U.S. and writes about each. He did the coastal redwoods, bristlecone pines, and sequoia, of course, but also bald cypress and some oaks and juniper. Most surprising to me is that one of the oldest is a Quaking Aspen called Pando. Not what you’d think of as a single tree but rather a grove of clones that all share the same root system. Dating of this trees is not possible by modern technology (his words) because there is no single piece of step from several thousand years ago, or any ancient remnants. Where would you look—the current expanse of Pando is 106 acres, so somewhere in there might be the oldest part. Or not.

But the best guess based on how fast an aspen clone spreads outward in a year, is between 8000 and 12,000 years. It cannot be older because the geologic record indicates that glaciers covered the ground until about 12,000 years ago.

 So I loved this book and would recommend it highly…with one issue. He begins each tree with a short description of what was happening to some unknown person of human history at about the same time as the tree was born. This humans used always seems to be halfway around the planet, in Tigris or China or Greece or some place totally irrelevant to the tree’s birth. It’s educational, a little, but it got old really fast.  (I started skipping the random people’s stories.)