Saturday, October 23, 2010

Landscape histories

October 22.

I notice that the first shrubs and trees to spring up in the sand on railroad cuts in the woods are sweet-fern, birches, willows, and aspens, and pines, white and pitch; but all but the last two chiefly disappear in the thick wood that follows.  The former are the pioneers.

You may conveniently tell the age of a pine, especially white pine, by cutting off the lowest branch that is still growing and counting its rings. Then estimate or count the rings of a pine growing near in an opening, of the same height as to that branch, and add the two sums together.

Count the rings of a white pine stump in Hubbard's oak wood by railroad. Ninety-four years. So this is probably second growth.

I see how meadows were primitively kept in the state of meadow by the aid of water, - and even fire and wind.

Swamps are, of course, least changed with us,- are nearest to their primitive state of any woodland.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  October 22, 1860

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