“I feel a great regard for trees; they represent age and beauty and the miracles of life and growth.” — Louise Dickinson Rich, “We Took To the Woods”

While there is no disputing the beauty of a lush, green landscape at high summer, there is also something to be said for the woods in winter. Absent are the broad strokes of color that accentuate the warmer seasons when sunlight manages to extract the maximum amount of chlorophyll from each plant’s tiny cells. In winter, the process stops, and nature renders in pen and ink the tangle of tree branches and denuded twigs normally hidden by summer’s leafy profusion.

Pines stand as charcoal gray shapes against a curtain of fog, and there is little trace of last night’s snow. The exposed branches of deciduous trees, stripped of their leaves, sport new splashes of pristine white that blow off in a great flurry as the wind rushes past. The pond’s wide expanse of snow, ringed with slim bare trunks, fools the eye into thinking it is nothing more than a vast field as the snow drifts across it, exposing areas of brownish, brackish water beneath a thin coating of ice.

Trees are recorders of history. Cut one down and you’ll see how old it is by the number of rings, which represents its years of growth. The outer bark, tight and fresh on young trees and wizened on older trees, is its permanent wrap, the cloak in which it lives out its years, however many or few, with new life stirring all the while just beneath it. Not only do a tree’s layers of old skin indicate its age, they also retain the memory of all that occurred during the years of its formation. And it can be fun, though rather sobering at times, to narrow down just what historic epochs a particular old-timer lived through.

A 100-year-old tree, which is not unusual in the world of oaks or pines, sprouted in 1913. More than likely, it did this without any great aplomb, simply emerging one day from the soil in a place where it was fortunate enough to have access to all the external forces a sapling needs to attain such a ripe old age. Like someone who will celebrate a 100th birthday this year, a century-old eastern white pine has lived through two world wars and many other lesser conflicts in between. It sprouted when Woodrow Wilson was president and has lived through 16 subsequent administrations. It has withstood blizzards, hurricanes, droughts and floods, and has stood by as others of its kind were toppled by human or natural intervention. And if it could talk, there would surely be lessons to be learned from one so patient, resigned and perseverant.

In actuality, a tree grows two new rings each year ”“ springwood and summerwood ”“ that appear to us as light and dark strips on the exposed surface of a tree stump, also called a tree “cookie.” The surface also illustrates all the other interior components of a tree trunk, most of which are actually dead, woody tissue whose only purpose is to hold the tree upright and support its heavy crown. Each of the types of intermediate layers serve different purposes within the tree, from the phloem just beneath the outer bark whose job it is to transport materials from the treetop to the roots and the xylem, or sapwood, that moves water up from the roots to the crown.

In maple trees, this is the area inside the trunk where sap is produced, whose watery, slightly sweet consistency is a far cry at this point from the product that may eventually drip off a stack of pancakes on someone’s plate. The very center of the trunk, the heartwood, stores the waste produced by the various parts of the tree during its years of growth. Because of the potential size of some of the larger species of trees, they have growth issues not common to smaller plants, the most important being how to supply each part of such a large organism with all that it needs to survive. The path between an oak tree’s crown and roots is a lot longer than that between the head of a violet and its roots, making the tree’s trunk crucial to its survival in terms of its ability to transport water, oxygen and minerals from the ground up and back again. All parts of a tree work in tandem to keep each other alive, with the trunk, or bole, serving as the conduit for all of these processes.

All told, there is so much going on inside a single tree, be it sapling or patriarch, that it’s safe to call it a living, breathing thing, capable of trapping and holding in its very core the essences of all that goes on around it. American Indians have long considered trees as sacred beings, capable of communicating wordlessly to those individuals attuned to their particular language. As for me, they’re the last thing I see when I look out my window at night as the sun sets, and the first I’ll see at daybreak. While I can’t actually hear them, they do often leave me at the end of a day with a sense that all is well and will continue to be so.

“We were here today,” they seem to say, “and we will be here again tomorrow.”

Not much in this world can make such a promise, but barring chain saws, lightning strikes and high winds, trees can and always will.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.