HOW OLD IS A TREE

[SHECURT2]

WE NEED TO FIND OUT HOW TO TELL HOW OLD A TREE CAN BE

[j2buttonsw]

Well apparently the oldest living tree has 4600 tree-rings which makes it pretty old http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/546.asp

[vicars]

Short of cutting it in half and counting the rings you could work out the height and ask a tree expert! I think it is probably impossible without counting the rings as trees will vary in sixe etc depending on local conditions, nutrition, weather conditions etc. If you can find a tree that has been cut nearby (of the same family) then count its age and see how much wider or thinner it is to the tree you want to age.

[Shipstabber]

I've promised to only give helpful answers, otherwise I would have suggested that you count the candles on it's birthday cake.

[Yeah Bee]

The oldest threes there are lives in the US don't know how many thousands of years they are. The Israeli army chopped down a couple of olive threes owned by a palestinian farmer. Those threes had been araund since jesus

[tomjones2004]

If it is of any use the, term for someone who studies the age of trees is a dendrochronologist.

[Shadow]

I know thanks to my history. Cut down a tree in half and check all the rings (layers) are on the tree. Wide rings indicate a good year while narrow rings indicate a bad year like there was no water barely and stuff like that. Now, this year is 2004. If a tree has 170 rings then it 170 years old. But by taking 2004 away from 170, that was the year a tree was first developed it's first ring...1834

[Drewhound]

You don't need to cut it down, you can use a special hollow auger to take a sample out of the tree and count the rings. If you know the species and size you can estimate it If it helps most big trees aren't as old as you may think

[New Forester]

As Drewhound says, you can bore a core with an auger, and if you are lucky enough to hit the centre it'll tell you how old it is.

 

Ho wever, trees grow at a fairly constant rate, and you can often work it out in other ways.

 

Conifers generally grow a new whorl of twigs around the leading shoot each year.  You can therefore just count the whorls of branches down the tree -- on young trees often all the way to the ground.  With older trees it'll still give you a good idea.

 

With other trees, the best way is not the height but the girth.  "Average" trees in Britain grow something like half an inch in girth (trunk circumference at chest height) each year, slowing to about half that when larger.  If the soil is good, it'll be faster, but if they've been polled or otherwise hacked about, or if they've been droughted or waterlogged, it'll be less.

 

Don't assume adjacent trees are the same age -- one spreading giant may be a youngish maiden in good soil, while the spindly one next door might be a pollard with constricted roots of twice the age.

 

C oppice trees are tricky.  These are trees which have been cut down regularly and allowed to regrow -- so the stems might be only twenty years old, but the stool might be a thousand or more.  You can recognise these because they usually have multiple (often curved) trunks from one stool.  The width of the stool is a guide to the age -- there are some which are perhaps 1500 years old!

 

C ont...

[New Forester]

....(cont)

Species such as poplar, sweet chestnut, firs and birch are fast-growing.  Ones such as oak and yew are slower.  The oldest trees in Britain are mostly around the 500 year mark, though there are a few much older.  A 500-year-old pollard oak might be 3 m in diameter or so.  Hacked-about trees often live very much longer.



Britai n has a very large proportion of the really old trees in Europe -- most other countries don't have the hundreds of ancient parkland trees we have.  Ancient trees have whole ecosystems living in them which are found nowhere else.  The more gnarled and rotten the better for wildlife and longevity.



Ter minology:

• Maiden: uncut tree.
• Pollard: tree cut (polled) regularly about 12 feet off the ground (for small timber in grazed areas -- poll means to crop the head)
• Stubb: cut at about waist height (usually as a boundary marker).
• Coppice: to cut at ground level.
• Shredded tree: side branches trimmed off all the way up (for straight timber).
• "Butchered tree" -- what many councils and tree surgeons do, having no idea of the above kinds.

(Wheeee! !  Bullet points!)