Several years ago, after Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ house in Vermont, lightning struck a backyard maple tree. There was a ferocious crack and the darkness outside the kitchen windows briefly turned day-bright. It wasn’t until spring that we knew for certain the tree was dead.
This maple was a youngster, its trunk the diameter of a salad plate. Were its life not cut short by catastrophe, the tree might have lived 300 years. But death by disaster is surprisingly common in trees. Sometimes it results from a tragic human blunder, as with the 3,500-year-old Florida bald cypress that was killed in 2012 by an intentionally lit fire. More often, calamity strikes via extreme weather — drought, wind, fire or ice. Of course, trees also are susceptible to pests and disease; adversaries like wood-decaying fungi can significantly shorten a tree’s life. But the ones that manage to evade such foes can live for an incredibly long time.
