Age

There are several ways to read a tree's age without cutting it. The most obvious is circumference — if you know the species and the growing conditions, you can estimate from girth. But that's a rough tool. What I prefer is bark.

Spruce bark starts smooth and grey, and as the tree ages it breaks into plates — first small, then larger, with deeper furrows between them. An old spruce has bark that looks almost like fish scales, rough and layered, and if you press your hand flat against it the texture is different from a young tree in a way I find difficult to describe except to say it has more resistance. Not hardness exactly. Presence.

I showed this to a group of schoolchildren once, on a forest walk the municipality arranged. I pressed my hand to an old spruce and asked if they could feel the difference from the young one beside it. Most of them couldn't, or said they couldn't. One girl, maybe ten, kept her hand on the bark for a long time without saying anything. Then she said: it feels like it knows we're here. I said yes, something like that, and meant it more than she probably understood.

Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.