A Book Older than God: The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine

The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history, from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, Indigenous peoples, and groups of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function in the ways they do. In Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future (Avid Reader Press, 2024), Daniel Lewis, the Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington, travels the world to learn about 12 extraordinary trees and their native habitats.

About the book, Library Journal writes: “Sounding at times like Thoreau, Lewis exhorts readers to try to see the world from a tree’s perspective and to practice empathy.” The following excerpt comes from the opening chapter, “A Book Older than God: The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine.”

The Great Basin bristlecone pine is not especially imposing in its height, greenery, or bulk. The tallest known individual is just fifty-two feet high, much shorter than many other mature tree species. It produces no oil, no fruits, no usable wood or other products humans covet or monetize. It needs little water. It’s a twisted refugee, growing only at high altitude in cold, windy, and often icy conditions, and in poor soil. But the bristlecone is a beautiful survivor, and its most ancient individuals, the oldest of all trees, are full of instructions and fascinations.

No one knows how old the oldest bristlecone pine might be. One tree clocks in at more than five thousand years—fifty centuries, validated by careful counting of the rings on cores extracted from the living tree. There may well be older individuals. The bristlecone pine’s longevity is baked into its scientific name: Pinus longaeva. Even its leaves can remain green for nearly a half century before dying. It serves as a crucial witness to the extended arc of the past. Many trees are like old books: they mark the passage of our years, including epochs of turbulence and calm. We can find evidence of these changes in numerous ways, but one key technique to understand their lives, and the planet’s lives, year over year, is to study those annual rings. The seasons’ variations in temperatures between winter and spring show up in the tree’s wood: colder weather means slower growth, and warmer means faster development. When a tree begins this rapid growth, it lays down what is known as earlywood, a pale band in its annual rings. As summer slides into fall, wood growth slows and leaves a darker annual ring called latewood. These and other changes in color and cell density mean tree rings are usually highly visible, and thus countable.

The innards of bristlecone pines, in the form of these growth rings, describe a regular turn from the start of the tree’s story to the present. They tell us not just about their lives but about the life around them. These trees record details to be deciphered by those with eyes and tools to see: changes in wind, weather, precipitation, and temperature, studied by attentive scientists who have the background to make sense of minute and subtle distinctions. There is inference, evidence, speculation, speciation—all visible in the rings of the trees, pages in life’s book.

I work with a fellow rare book curator at The Huntington named Steve Tabor, whom I admire. He’s thin, with a white mustache. He likes birds, and bicycles. Steve is an authority on early printed books who, with no artifice or arrogance, will drop an obscure Latin phrase into a conversation or an email. He is utterly unselfconscious, often with his foot up on his desk through his open door, stretching. A book scientist, Steve is deeply involved in the minute changes shown by paper, type, ink, and binding: forensic analysis of the fluctuating ways we’ve produced knowledge over the last five hundred years. He pointed out to me that the Latin word liber—the old common term for a book—means the inner bark or rind of a tree. He also explained a number of the deeper etymological ties between books and trees. The Germanic word for “book” and its cognates derive from the Indo-European word for “beech tree.” The etymology and physical presence of books is saturated with trees, and with the ghosts of trees and their remains.

The book world offers still other cognates. Paper, bindings, sewing, and leather are all part of the stream of testimony. In the same way that dendrochronologists—scientists who study the rings of trees—can tease out evidence you’d not anticipate, the same applies to old books, where papermakers crafted their products from remnants of cotton clothing, and printers and bookbinders created and assembled their products by hand. Old books are simply teeming with evidence if you have the right context and experience, and this applies to tree rings as well as to old books.

Occasionally, in looking at pages in an antiquarian book, you’ll see a small, splattery dot, as if something wet had once landed on the page. Hundreds of years ago, artisans made paper by macerating cotton rags into a watery slurry, and then dipping a mold made of closely spaced wires into the pulpy mix, and draining out the liquid. But what causes that dot? They’re common enough that these splashy marks have a name: vatman’s tears. A vatman was the person responsible for dipping the mold into the heated slurry of water and pulped cotton rags. It was hot work, and the splash mark most likely came from a wet arm or sleeve, or possibly a bead or two of sweat from the vatman’s forehead.

So paper is not just paper. It tells stories. And trees are not just trees, because their lives are marked by events that occur in the strata of formation. Some of this evidence about the past comes from immediate moments, such as a lightning strike. Other marks stem from longer intervals: a beetle boring though a layer of cambium, an ancient piece of barbed wire from a long-gone fence, or an old bullet buried in an even older tree. But more ubiquitously, trees reveal past details about matters of global interest and significance: changes in the climate; in the constitution of the air, water, and soil; and other environmental variations. Climate hovers in and around the tree, literally and metaphorically, because the changing climate and its effects on all lives on the planet is the existential issue of our time.

If a giant standing in the center of what is now California had cupped some seeds of bristlecone pines in his hands and flung them messily eastward, dropping a few and tossing the rest, you’d have the approximate distribution of the bristlecone pine. Its distribution spills across a strap of higher-elevation land that reaches from eastern California across Nevada and into Utah. The tree grows very slowly, sometimes increasing its diameter a mere inch over a century. It doesn’t like shade, and tends to grow fairly widely spaced, and only at high altitudes, typically above fifty-five hundred feet. This distribution reduces competition with other plants. The extreme environment also slackens other predators’ activities. Wood-rotting fungi have a difficult time getting purchase in the cold, dry, and windy climate. The tree lives in challenging soil, too: rocky dolomitic and limestone-based ground, all of which keeps life inching along.

Just as photographs of Charles Darwin invariably show the old, infirm naturalist with his big white beard, though he was once a young man, so too does the bristlecone pine appear in the public imagination as an oldster, which of course if can become. But it starts as a sapling, then fills out, adding many branches and cones. The tree’s height is limited by moisture stresses at its top; it can pump water up only so high. And the taller it gets, the more exposed it is to drying winds. Some old pines on windy summits are shaped into spectacular positions by relentless winds, which sometimes turn a branch so that it’s pointing toward the ground rather than skyward. In a few locales in the tree’s range, such as on Mount Washington in Nevada, you’ll even sometimes see trees so forced into position that they’ve been subdued into a dense mat of growth close to the ground and unrecognizable as a tree. The term for this type of vegetation is krummholz, from the German “crooked wood.” The tree’s capacity to twist into gnarled forms in response to environmental forces has meant that humans can’t use it for lumber, or for much else. Nevertheless, it retains a right to live, and to succeed.

While humans don’t scavenge the tree, other creatures do. Porcupines girdle the bristlecone by eating the bark, which can kill the tree. Bark beetles can cause extensive damage beneath the tree’s outer layers. Lightning strikes on high mountain ridges can burn down a tree, or severely damage it; and the endless freeze-thaw cycles crack limbs and roots. The effects of age and brutal conditions on the bristlecone make it breathtakingly, sculpturally beautiful. At the same time, the oldest individuals look like hell, having taken an intense beating from the elements—the only conditions where they’re adapted to live. But we have convincing evidence that the trees don’t lapse into senescence. Their difficulties stem from the circumstances in which they grow, but not from any inherent biological decline. Old trees form and grow buds with the same vigor as much younger trees, and they make functional cells for thousands of years. Researchers believe that the tree has no upper age limit. Under the right conditions, a bristlecone could survive indefinitely.

To read more, you can order Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future from the Huntington Store.

Daniel Lewis is the Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington.