Aspen trees (Peter Haigh/Getty Images)

I was reading John Muir today over at The Atlantic, and, as you might guess, he makes a couple of good points regarding trees. One: “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away.”

And two: It takes a long time to grow an old-growth forest. “During a man’s life, only saplings can be grown. … It took more than 3,000 years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forest.” It would have been a shame for “fools” to take down those old, old trees.

Old, old trees are the best, of course: Like the colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah, who’ve shared a root system for 80,000 years. Some folks think those white-washed, identical trees predate humans, according to Wired.

And I’ve written about General Sherman before — the ancient sequoia in California’s lovely Sequoia National Park that stands 270 feet tall, as tall as a 27-story building. Sherman and his relatives were born 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

The world’s oldest individual tree (as far as we currently know), is a 9,550-year-old spruce, standing on a mountain in the Dalarna province in Sweden. At first this guy was considered a newcomer, according to ScienceDaily. But it turns out he’s just so resilient, he was unrecognizable — able to sprout a new trunk each time the old one dies.

Trees don’t talk much, of course. But they say so much — “freely providing forbidden knowledge / Of so many things about heaven and earth / For which we should otherwise have no word.” Least that’s how Howard Nemerov put it in his poem “Trees.” You should read the whole thing. Nemerov has it right, I think — about the trees.

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