October 4, 2012
By Ken Moore
It is hard for us not to see time (click here) through the lens of our species; humans have life spans measured in decades, at most about a century. Most other organisms with which we form close relationships have life spans shorter than we do. We have pets that live a decade or two. We plant a garden, which dies in the fall and is replanted in the spring. Perhaps we have a psychological vanity that we are nearly immortal, presiding godlike over our dependent animals and plants, watching their beginnings and ends.
However, we live our lives around organisms that live much longer than we do, that may be almost unchanged from the time of our birth to the time of our death, that stolidly oversaw events that we might consider impossibly long ago (a band of Native Americans moving along a trading path, the American Revolution, the founding of the University of North Carolina, the marriage of our great-great-great grandparents, the Civil War) and may see the 24th century. Most trees have life spans of centuries, often many centuries, and while in the eastern Piedmont we lack the “Methusaleh trees” (bald-cypresses, redwoods, sequoias, bristlecone pines) with lifespans of millenia, we still live among trees that far outlast us....
...Instead, consider our post oaks (Quercus stellata) common trees of the high, dry, granite monadnock of Chapel Hill. Sometimes called “iron oak,” this species is a survivor, tolerant of drought and fire and nutrient starvation. It grows slowly, often adding less than 1/16 of an inch of diameter in a year, especially when growing on a dry granite hilltop in acidic soils. Growing as little as half an inch a decade and six inches a century, post oaks develop wood that is hard and tough, the heaviest wood in North America....
