This stand of magnificent trees is composed of red pines, pinus resinosa.
Each tree is between 60 and 65 feet tall and they are all exactly 51 years old. How can I be so sure about height and age?
Height is easy to determine using the Calloway 300 Pro Laser Range Finder. Age? Here's the history. In 1970, some friend or acquaintance, I can't remember exactly who, acquired a hundred red pine seedlings for a forestry project. . He couldn't make use of all of them and so he gave us ten -- each one perhaps 4-6 inches long and the sum of their stems no thicker than a #2 pencil. I didn't know exactly what to do with these treasures, so i planted them in a row in the vegetable garden. Which is where they sat until 1972, when I decided to plant them on the dike of the newly constructed pond, where they remain.
In doing so i acted in defiance of the local wisdom, which is, never plant a tree on the dike. Why? Because the tree will eventually die, and the "water will follow the roots" and weaken the dam. I judged this reasoning to be faulty. In the first place, red pines, like all conifers, are shallow-rooted. The surface of the dike is fifteen feet above the level of the water in the pond, so when the pine eventually dies, its rootball is will still be above water level. Moreover, red pines are reported to live for centuries (some say four hundred years), and I just can't bring myself to worry about what's going to happen to a dike in the far distant future when, no doubt, the pond will long since have reverted to the thick swamp that it was before we dug it out.
But why red pines rather than white (pinus strobus) which is generally considered to be the much superior species? Because a), I had these red pine seedlings availablei in the garden, and b) because at that time many of the white pines in our neighborhood were suffering from a insect-borne disease that killed the leader shoot and therefore deformed the tree (leader shoot disease seems to be a thing of the past and now our young white pines are again growing up tall and straight). And red pines as consistently healthy.
For their first decade, the red pines made scarcely any impression on the landscape. Now they dominate. When I sit in their shade, I am pleased to recall their entire history, which allows me to tell them, proudly, "I knew you when you were just a sprout!"
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