We were a team of five: Jan, Paul, Jonas, Claudia, and me. Four dendrochronologists and one son of a dendrochronologist. Jan Esper flew in from Germany. Paul Krusic drove his Land Rover from his home in Stockholm down to southern Italy and then on the ferry across to Greece. He had brought his son Jonas, a precocious 12-year-old Viking. Claudia Hartl and I drove in from neighbouring Albania, where we had already spent 10 days sampling.
We all met up in Samarina, a small Greek village at the foot of Mount Smolikas, the highest peak in the Pindos mountains. The reason we were there was to core trees called Bosnian pines (Pinus heldreichii), which we suspected could be old.
What we didn’t know that morning was quite how old. Nor just how much these trees would tell us about the centuries of events and circumstances they had experienced in their lifetime.
Trees hold stories: they are witnesses of time and history. Of course, we can read a tree’s age and local climate from its rings, but in recent years we’ve discovered so much more. Deep inside a tree’s trunk is an archive waiting to be found: tales of planetary shifts, cosmic events, and even turning points in human history. And the oldest trees have seen it all.
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Paul had been the first to suspect that the Bosnian pines, growing on the rugged mountain slopes of Greece’s heartland, might be very long lived. While reading an obscure dissertation, he had stumbled upon a photograph of the species on Mount Smolikas. As a tree connoisseur, he could see that the pines displayed all the stereotypical features of an ancient tree: an untapered, columnar stem with heavy branches; large, exposed roots; a flattened crown, not unlike a bonsai tree; and a dead top. The photograph showed the pines growing in a steep, rocky landscape, inhospitable to most organisms and processes that kill trees. In places with few insects, fires or humans, trees can grow for centuries if not millennia. But to find out the pines’ exact age, we would have to climb Mount Smolikas to collect samples.
In the morning, we set off on our two-hour hike, along a trail mostly used by shepherds. It would lead us to the upper treeline. Along with our lunches and raingear, we carried corers and notebooks in our backpacks. And Paul brought a chainsaw to cut cross-sections from the sun-bleached dead logs littering the landscape. These were the relic trunks of pine ancestors that had died hundreds of years earlier. We hoped that they would tell us about the history of Mount Smolikas even further back in time than the lifespan of the living trees, perhaps over a millennium or more
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