by Nina Newington “It could take an old field a thousand years to get that pit and mound topography,” said Whitman. “In managed forests you rarely get that, because large trees are cut before they can fall down.” * Preparing to give a talk about Old and Old-Growth Forests at the first SOOF Soup Sunday of the year, I came across that quote. It brought into focus a feeling that has grown stronger the more time I have spent exploring the old forests around Goldsmith Lake: my feet recognize old-growth just as much as my eyes do. Often, in very old forest, instead of walking along, stepping over the odd branch or tree trunk, my feet are either picking a zig zag course between the little ridges or climbing up and down, up and down, up and down, crossing those ridges which aren't so much ridges as elongated mounds. There are not the bouldery forest floors anyone who wanders the woods on the South Mountain is familiar with. There may be rocks around but they are not what form the mounds. Sometimes the mounds are like ripples in the forest floor, running more or less parallel to each other. At other times they are more jumbled. There's a name for this shaping of the forest floor: pit and mound. It is created when trees uproot. We've all seen blown over white spruce, the fan of their roots suddenly at right angles to the ground. Where the roots were, there is now a shallow pit. When those roots rot down, along with whatever soil and stones still cling to them, they form a mound. The roots on an uprooted 60-year-old white spruce don’t form much of a mound. It will erode away quickly. The kind of pit and mound topography that sticks around for 300 to 500 years or more is only created when very large trees are uprooted. What causes large old trees to fall over, tearing their roots free of the soil? Usually very strong winds, sometimes ice storms. Major hurricanes in Nova Scotia’s history have left their mark on the forest floor in this way. When many of those elongated mounds in the forest floor run parallel to each other, this is the signature of a major storm. I'm not good enough at reading the forest floor yet to be able to identify places where pit and mound tells the tale of a particular storm. But I can do some basic math. When I stand in front of a yellow birch that is 80 cm in diameter and about 300 years old, and that yellow birch is growing on top of a mound created when a tree that was, in all probability, at least as big and as old, fell over, I have a pretty good idea that I'm standing somewhere that has been forest continuously for more than 600 years. Even if the tree that formed the mound was a mere 150 years old, well, 450 years later takes us back to 1575. Pre-colonization. Back to a time when the people living here treated the forest and its inhabitants as relations, not resources. The odds are good, then, that this forest floor with its pit and mound has been forest floor for thousands of years. Trees have grown and died, grown and died, many of old age, some perhaps harvested by Indigenous people, others blown over when a major storm struck. The forest lived on, until the settlers arrived and the felling and burning and plowing and felling again began. The pit and mound under my feet tells me that this particular ground was not plowed. There was probably some logging. Fires may have burned here. Storms certainly rampaged through. But even if most of the big trees blew down in a hurricane, as long as no-one came and hauled out all the wood, the ecological continuity of the forest lived on. In the soil, fungi and microbes continued to cooperate and compete, trading information, groceries and medicines, linking tree to tree. It is this continuity my feet feel, entering ancient forest. As magical as it is, when I greet a grandmother yellow birch, to let my eyes travel up and up her trunk, I love to look down too, to where, so often, her toes are showing - the tops of her roots exposed as the mound where she germinated slowly erodes. ***** Nina Newington is a writer, gardener and forest protector. She lives with her wife on the North Mountain in Kespukwitk, District 1 of the seven traditional districts of Mi’kma’ki. She is president of the Save Our Old Forests Association and a member of the Citizen Scientists of Southwest Nova Scotia. In 2024 she spent the better part of 6 months at Lichen Camp, on a logging road in the proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area, documenting species at risk and identifying old growth forest stands. **Andrew Whitman at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, cited by Joe Rankin in “Old Growth” Forests Defined by Key Ecological Characteristics on Forests for Maine’s Future (Dec 20, 2016)
With thanks to David Patriquin, http://nsforestnotes.ca/2019/02/04/if-an-old-growth-stand-blows-down-is-it-still-old-growth/
1 Comment
1/25/2025 08:37:54 pm
Nice post, Nina! I love forests where the pit and mount topography is very evident. The moss is often so deep and if you plunge your hand down into it, there is often so much water being retained there. It's easy to see how those forests are able to help buffer and retain water, help to clean the water and stop erosion after heavy rains or snow melt. The pits also provide such good habitat for creatures such as Salamanders and are often the site of vernal pools needed for some Frog and Salamander species. All that retained moisture in the earth and around the trees and in decaying wood helps to prevent or limit the damage of wildfires. And, for all of us, there are places mostly undisturbed for centuries. It's very sad that humans don't put a greater value on Old forests that have existed for much longer than artifacts in a typical museum.
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