Eastern White Cedar

In the book, ‘The Last Stand: A Journey through the Ancient Cliff-Face Forest of the Niagara Escarpment, Peter E Kelly and Doug Larson describe an amazing discovery that they made relating to a grove of eastern white cedar that was growing on a cliffside below a popular hiking trail near Niagara Falls. This grove, while in plain sight, was completely undiscovered as an eastern white cedar grove, and was underestimated for years, until Kelly and Larson took a core sample of one of the small and gnarled trees growing from the cliffside.

Where they were expecting to find that the trees were young, and small due to the harsh conditions, instead they found that they were some of the oldest trees on the continent. Their core samples dated to over 1,000 years old! Eastern white cedar grows both on cliff sides and in marshlands, and has even been resilient as a decorative planting in lawns, serving as privacy screens and wind buffers across much of Canada and the North East United States.

The oldest living tree that Kelly and Larson found was from 688 AD. Because the wood is rot resistant, some of the dead trees were also cored, and identified as dating back to the BCs. They live for so long there in part because nothing else can, no one could reach them, and the diseases, animal predation, and natural phenomena that are often responsible for tree death in forested areas could not reach them. The cliffside is very inhospitable, mostly dirt and nutrient free, so anything living there is doing so on the verge of starvation. Yet, even there, life persists!