In Search of the Old Ones

August 28, 2023
Fredericks (The Secret Life of Clams), a professor emeritus of education at York College of Pennsylvania, serves up pensive if rambling meditations on 10 species of trees that can live to be more than a thousand years old. Exploring the adaptations that contribute to the trees’ longevity, he explains that California’s redwoods evolved needle-like leaves capable of absorbing fog, which spares the trees from having to transport water 350 or so feet from their roots to their uppermost branches, and that bristlecone pines developed shallow roots to better “seize the scarce moisture” in California’s White Mountains. Fredericks adorns the science with poetic flourishes, including scenes depicting what humans were doing around the time that some of the oldest existing trees sprouted. For example, he describes a Wanakipa teenager watching her mother collect shellfish for dinner around 10,979 BCE to emphasize the age of a 13,000-year-old colony of palmer’s oak in Riverside County, Calif. The lack of an overall argument tying together the science, anecdotes about Fredericks seeking out the trees in their natural habitats, and dendrochronology methods makes this feel a bit meandering, but the author’s reverence for his subjects endears (“Wise teachers, those redwoods”). The result is a ruminative exploration of some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. Illus.