How long do trees live?
Old-growth forests are everyone’s darling, prized either for logging splendid trees or for preservation of their intricate, unspoiled nature. Before Seattle was logged, it too was an old-growth forest. There were so many trees that loggers could afford to be selective, and could ignore hard-to-fell or imperfect trees. As a result, today we have trees here and there which are older than Seattle. In other words, trees born well before the 1850s. Our oldest are almost certainly cedars and firs. They tend to be at once abundant and intrinsically long-lived. Some other common trees such as alder and dogwood, willow and cottonwood, are short-lived, which –for a tree– is to say they’ve got roughly the same lifespan of humans. In contrast, the world’s oldest trees are likely around 5,000 years.
