"They're wonderful gnarled trees," says lumberman Jamey French, whose parents live here in central New Hampshire. The trees were likely planted by the family that originally built the house around 1790. In central New Hampshire, a pair of sugar maple trees frames the doorway to a historic house. Early Americans were crazy for this tree.Īnd why not? It was a ready-made foliage festival, the promise of winter syrup on snow and, possibly, the most beautiful and durable wood in the forest. The reason was not natural selection, but human predilection. All the trees that were growing in 1763 are still growing outside in this landscape," Cogbill says.īeech trees once dominated Calais, but by the late 1800s sugar maples ruled throughout the region. "We've got maple, spruce, beech, ash, hemlock. the original 1763 animal-skin parchment - he lists the big trees growing at the corner of the lots. Studying the lotting map of the town of Calais, Vt. "But they've been here for 8,000 years."Ĭogbill's current focus is the pre-settlement forest, the way the landscape looked before white settlers shoed a horse or churned a tub of butter. "They were actually more abundant during the inter-glacial period 4,000 years ago," Cogbill says. You could almost hear the tree click off."Īn exquisitely sensitive tree, shuddering at the slightest chill, the sugar maple has a wide variety of residents, ecologists and scientists worried about how it will fare should Northeast temperatures rise as projected during the next century of climate change.Īs he looks out over the hills of Northeastern Vermont, historical ecologist Charlie Cogbill takes his cues about sugar maples from their past. Then a cloud went over and the sap stopped. "It was 34 degrees, and the sap was just pouring out. "I was tapping the trees right beside my house, and it was early in the season," Carlson says. Martha Carlson has a number of favorite trees, with stories to tell about each one.
In the Carlsons' forest in Sandwich, N.H., a few date from the 1700s. It's an autumn delicacy, a thunderhead of foliage. The real find here is the description of tree species written in the corner of each 18th century lot.Ĭonsider the color of fall leaves on a sugar maple tree: peach, orange, lemon, mango. Charlie Cogbill reads the original lotting map for the town of Calais, Vt.
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