Frank Morton

I had the solemn and strenuous task of butchering a very old friend in January. We had only lived with the oak for ten years, but it was very old. It stood at the drive entrance like a sentinel looking south, the last of an ancient pair that made a grand impact when they stood together. The older larger one toppled into the street six years ago, a dead snag of a giant that housed a colony of acorn woodpeckers and hosted conventions of everything from blackbirds to crows to turkey vultures. It was dead when we bought the place, and we didn’t mind it that way, knowing that an oak can exist with purpose long after it is dead.

The last one standing was about half alive, and took in the surviving woodpeckers along with starlings. Bald eagles and a raven pair visited frequently, kestrels and Cooper’s hawks took turns spying the landscape from leafless spires. I could see the bark beginning to crack at the soil line, so I knew that this tree would probably not outlive me. During every windstorm I prepared myself for the work and power outage that would follow a fall. As they say, if you make enough predictions, you will eventually be right. On the day of a serious January ice storm, I regarded the crystal encasement growing around the trunk and every twig and thought again, This could be the day.

The crash was very loud, shattering, dwarfing the sound of ice sheets sliding off the greenhouse where Mark and I were knocking it free from the inside. And that was it, my long dreaded event lay splayed across the lawn and street and into the neighbor’s pasture, eighty feet of scattered remains that I would now get to explore by dissection.

When I cut a tree into firewood, I like to start at the ends of branches where the wood is an inch in diameter, cutting stove lengths down the branch until I reach a fork, then starting again at the ends and working down again until the branch is done. By the end, I have a minimal amount of twiggy material for the brush pile and a maximum amount of stove wood in a range of round sizes. The upper reaches of this tree had an ecology of its own; short grass growing on the highest dead branches, mistletoe covered with golden crusts of lichens we never see on earthly plains, jelly fungus, and licorice ferns, moss matts and micro-mushrooms. 

About forty feet up, the trunk divided into limbs bigger than my waist, some completely solid and sound, others dying by degrees, and some dead grey burled branches pocked by granary holes made by acorn woodpeckers for storing their winter cache. Near the top, where knot holes provided entry, woodpeckers had hollowed a deep nesting chamber with an entrance at both top and bottom. This very spot had landed directly atop a t-post of the neighbor’s electric fence, driving the post entirely into the earth, and splitting the nest cavity into a cutaway display. Sawing my way down other limbs, the struggle between living and dying displayed itself as live solid wood hollowing out in the center as I cut toward fungal infections of the heartwood lower down. I realized that the real hollowing-out was first done by fungus, leaving a soft shredded fiber of recalcitrant lignin. The woodpeckers took over the process once they made their entry, pecking away the digested heartwood to make way for comfortable nesting.

Another large limb had shattered lengthwise when it hit the pavement, making another display of the oak’s resident subcultures. Two inches of living sapwood encased sixteen inches of digested punky heartwood laced through with white mycelium. Down the center of this, extending six feet before disappearing down the heart of the tree, was a mycelial mass, 2-3 inches in diameter with all the appearances of a spinal cord, and the texture of a brain. It occurred to me I was looking at a body of an individual, a being inside the being of this tree. This infection could have arisen from a wound right here, from a single spore infecting a single insult. Crawling over every surface of this space were ants (dark head, red thorax, dark abdomen with light stripes), angry ants on patrol that were soon biting my neck and scalp. It’s likely these ants were here because of the fungus, making their home where mycelium has softened the heartwood so that ants could chew their galleries to make a home. I wondered first if the ants were eating the mycelium, then noticed blackened and broken lattices of brittle mycelial remains, where ants had chewed the digested wood away, leaving exposed the 3-D framework of persistent fungal networks. The ants weren’t eating the fungus, they were chewing around it. 

Leaf-cutter ants are well known for their fungal agriculture, but they do not grow mycelium as food for adults. It is fit food only for the larval stage of anthood; adults get their food value from sap of the leaves they cut up and transport. In fact, there are no reported observations of ants feeding on mushrooms or mycelium, one of the few food resources not  employed by ants. Ants found on mushrooms are there to gather insect larvae that feed on fungal flesh. I am left to wonder whether fly larvae feed in rotted wood cavities like this one, and whether these ants are getting food, fungal-fed larvae, as well as shelter from this cohabitation. 

There is always the question in mind, How old is this tree? as I cut my way from top to bottom. Once the limbs collect into the single bole it is much larger than my saw bar, at least 32 inches across, each round far heavier than I can lift. I manage to roll them into the tractor bucket to clear the road, dropping them into a large pile of work for later on. I counted rings on the trunk 20 feet from the roots, using pins to mark every 25 years of growth. The rings are so narrow toward the end, counting them is difficult even with a pin tip for keeping track. 218 years or more, plus the time required to grow 20 feet. 240 or 250 years old. The time of the American Revolution, and the writing of the Constitution.

It always grew slow, positioned on a south-facing slope. Some of its best years were between 75 and 100, a period that included the Civil War. After that is a steady narrowing of each year’s growth, until the sapwood is barely decipherable. In the beginning its growth was straight, undivided and scarcely branched, as if crowded by other trees. Around the year Oregon became a State (1859), conditions opened up, broadening the annual growth rings. But the tree’s path was set, reaching upward rather than spreading, until it eventually attained 80 feet. This made it the sentinel tree, the highest point around from which birds of every feather liked to peer alone or gather in flocks. The highest reaches were eventually leafless horizontal perches, collecting guano that mixed with bark to make a soilless mix that grew a resilient turf far above the earth. Topknots on these branches devolved into extended burls, eventually dropping their bark to expose swirling patterns of frustrated growth that look like the details of Jovian storms. On one morning of the tree’s last summer, I counted a committee of 26 vultures gathered there, all airing their wings at once. It looked like the tree was going to fly.

Looking under and into the pried up trunk, I could see that many of the roots were rotted through. I don’t know for certain as yet if this is the same mycelial body that resided in the limbs, but it is clear that the root fungus slowly killed the tree. It’s possible that it accounts for the gradual decrease in yearly growth after the tree reached 100, or likely, there was a more recent event. At some point, the lower 18 inches of trunk were buried in soil that included broken glass and fine china, the result of a landscaping initiative to level the lawn. This likely contributed to the tree’s decline. The rotted bark at the soil surface was replete with the same ants found high in the hollow limbs, but I could not find the black rhizomorphs characteristic of Armillaria ostoyae, the honey fungus, the most likely source of root rot and white mycelium infection in oaks. I’ve never seen mushrooms around the base of the tree, so the fungal identity escapes me. Sometimes, I have read, Armillaria doesn’t act normal, so no mushrooms or no rhizomorphs doesn’t really mean no honey fungus. So much experience is this way, unclear.

In 1920, 104 years ago, our house was built, and the land was set to dairying. The new tenants planted a black walnut in the yard, now 4 feet in diameter, and a sweet cherry beside the house, a tree that was blooming when we bought the place. The cherry died at 100 years of age, three or four times the normal age for a sweet cherry. At 250 years, the fallen oak was half the proposed life expectancy for an Oregon oak, although the only 500 year old specimens noted in the Oregon forestry literature are found on Sauvie Island, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. There you’ll also find the very finest soil in the state, deeply deposited, and no hardwood mills. 

How long should a tree live? As in all matters ecological, it depends. Location, soil, aspect, climate, injury, parasitic insurgence, logging and agriculture...how many stresses must any tree endure? Looking around the modern world, there are very few opportunities for trees to attain and long enjoy full maturity. In The Nature of Oaks, Douglas Tallamy proposes that white oaks in eastern North America “will grow for 300 years, maintain a stasis between new growth and canopy loss for the next 300 years, and then decline for 300 years more.” I am from that country, and I have never seen a 600 year old oak. The oldest deciduous oaks in North America seem to be 500 years old. Evergreen Live oaks live longer--there is a purported 1500 year old in Louisiana, and a 2000 year old in southern California. These must be like the 110 year old people among us, showing what a few of us can endure, but it is not the typical lifespan. Every living thing is a microbe meal just waiting to be served, in its own time, which can be any moment.

Time can be defined as the rearrangement of matter, generally toward greater entropy. Living beings are the only rearrangements of matter toward greater organization, unless we consider star formation and the creation of planetary discs (which are worth considering, since this is where life really begins). Perhaps our tools and artifacts for a moment resemble our bodies, being rearranged into sharp order as they are constructed, but the finished state is ephemeral. Our devices dull, fade, flake, and break. Only our attention and care can keep them whole and functioning. Our institutions and social organizations are much like our tools, prone to dissolution over time as competing interests pull things apart, until the center cannot hold. How long can civilizations stand? It depends.

Age is experience. A tree experiences everything that comes its way. There is no flight, and the fight it can put up is purely defensive. There is no biting back at a beaver or the encroaching rhizomorphs, which spread out in a great radius from every Armillaria-infected tree, seeking more roots to infect, more trees to hollow out. Every tree records a history of its experience; its infections, parasitisms, competitions, brushes with fire, and cohabitations with fungi, insects, birds, and mammals, including people. They rate the good years and the bad. Trees remember their histories better than people, and they show the truth in their scars, hollows, and burls. There’s no avoiding their age and experience. It’s their embodiment.

Age can only be seen as a blessing, an ever more privileged state of being. Every living thing strives for it, endures and overcomes to achieve it. It is a wish we all carry, that we  experience the humbling grace of aging. It’s the simple quest of life.

Originally published in the 2024 Wild Garden Seed Catalog.