The Cedar Tree — A Forgotten Canadian Tree Worthy of Legends
I used to spend a lot of time in a forest just outside city limits hiking to a massive oak tree that the locals call “Titan”. Titan was maybe the biggest tree I’ve even seen. It looked like a tree that Druids would worship. It was an Eastern North American Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa, America’s strongest Oak.
And it was dead. Or at least as far as I could tell, there were no leaves on it, but there’s a saying with Oaks, ‘a hundred years growing, a hundred years living, a hundred years dying’. An oak might look dead, but still be kicking for decades at least. Dead or dying though, it didn’t change Titan’s size. There was something elemental about them (Oak Trees are non-binary!). Something so old, it visually seemed deep, even though I was looking a behemoth, it felt like I was on the tip of a cliff.
My city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada was massively clear cut when the Europeans Colonizers (my ancestors) came. All of Southern Ontario was. All the old trees, the forests the Natives knew, destroyed. All the wood gone to build ships, railroads, and houses. Fuel to burn for the industrial revolution and the British empire. Titan’s forest, like the rest of Southern Ontario’s current old forests, are all secondary growth. Trees that sprouted up in the devastation that happened to their parents.
I often find myself fantasying about what my home’s forests looked before they were cut down. A lot of the scholarly literature toward Europeans first reactions to the forest of Eastern North America are skeptical because their claims about tree sizes seem overtly ridiculous. The current tallest trees in the world, Western North America’s Redwoods, can grow 100 meters high. A height now made minuscule when compared to the size of huge buildings, like the CN Tower (553 meters), but it took over 100 years after their discovery for us to build something as tall. Before planes these trees seemed (and tourists say they still do) like they reached up to space. They can grow so big because they are right on the coast of the ocean and constantly in mist, so getting the water to the top of the tree — the biggest constraint on tree growth. Water is life — isn’t that much of an issue. The Redwoods are one of the wonders of the world.
There are stories Ontario’s White Pine growing to 100 meters.
Often these stories are written off as settlers underestimating how high 100 meters is. That they were just overwhelmed by how tall they were compared to smaller European trees (The Redwoods weren’t “discovered” till decades later). They might be right; these might be exaggerations. Ontario doesn’t have the ocean mist the redwoods need. However, there are some written accounts of white pines being measured to be about that long. It’s an area I plan to do some more research on in the future. Regardless though, it’s a fact that ancient trees of Southern Ontario were incredibly huge, much bigger than we realize. We marvel at the size of trees in west coast forests, forgetting that we once had massive trees of our own.
There are lots of stories of Oak Trees so massive that they touched the heavens. The founder of Guelph, John Galt, once came across an Oak near Hamilton, Ontario that was the biggest tree he had ever seen. So big he called it “the greatest known” and fantasized about the awe its long planks of wood would produce if he cut it down and shipped it back to England. South Ontario also has some of the most diverse forest in North America, there would been all sorts of ancient and massive trees everywhere. It was a literal tree paradise.
So, when I looked at Titan, I wasn’t just seeing its massive size, but I was imagining the size of its ancestors. How big these ancient Bur Oaks would have grown over thousands of years.
There were a few other oak trees growing in Titan’s forest. None as old or as big, all still in the ‘100 years living’ phase. The last children of what was once an incredible history of large trees. I couldn’t find any baby oaks growing to continue the line. The forest was mostly full of another, much thinner and shorter tree, the Eastern White Cedar, Thuja occidentalis, that shaded out baby oaks from growing.
I didn’t think much of these cedar trees at first. It was Titan’s and their fellow Bur Oaks’ forest. Cedars were just taking up space and making the oaks seem greater by contrast. Then one day I came across a freshly cut cedar tree (it had been blown down in a recent storm and was blocking the trail) and bent down to count its rings.
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Time spent counting tree rings is never time wasted. Seeing a year in centimeter of wood and a lifetime in a series of rings makes you realize how small and unimportant and, yet unique and special you are.
To my shock, this cedar tree, which I could almost wrap one hand around, had a least a hundred rings. The rings were so close together it was hard to count, I easily could have counted two rings as one multiple times. This tree could be 150 years old maybe 200. The tree could be as old as Titan despite being puny in comparison!
There were other cedar trees that had been cut as they fell and blocked trail, so I started going around counting rings on as many as I could. Ages varied. I found some that had lived till at least a hundred, but the original one I counted still seemed to be the oldest. I also found much thicker cedars, that it would take at least one arm to wrap around instead of just a hand, that were only 90 years old when cut. Cedars seem to — and looking at the literature later confirmed this — generally grow very slow (small rings) but can grow quicker (big rings) depending on its growing location (more sun, nutrients, water etc).
Now, earlier I had said that all the ancient forest of Southern Ontario is gone, but it turns out I was wrong. In the late 1980s a University of Guelph Professor, Douglas Larson, and his student, Caedmon Nash, discovered cedar trees growing in Southern Ontario that were a thousand years old.
I gotta slow down and focus on that number for a sec. What it implies. How supernatural it is. Europeans only found America in 1492, the trees had been alive for 500 years before that. Around a thousand years ago my franco-german ancestors were still Pagans fighting off Christendom and worshiping massive trees as gods (Maybe they were right?). The lifetime and the changes of the world these trees have seen is incomprehensible.
The cedar trees ability to grow incredibly slowly, to increase their size by the tiniest amount every year, is what keeps them alive so long. Other trees can’t grow that slow, and those that can, like the Bristle-cone pine, also grow to be incredibly ancient.
Cedar trees two main causes of death are forest fires and wind. They generally avoid forest fires by growing in wet and swampy areas, using their widespreading and shallow root system to hold them in place through flooding. If you live in Eastern North America and like hiking, you are probably intimately familiar with moist-cedar forests: their deep, cool shade, roots exposed and stretched over rocks, a lack of undergrowth, and small streams that grow large come rainfall. Best of all that unmistakable minty, cedar smell that makes the forest seem to have a different, cleaner kind of air.
Unfortunately, a shallow spreading root system and a thin trunk, means cedars get blown over relatively easily in storms. Especially when forests have been disturbed and gaps cut into them which allows wind in (A lot of cedars in my forest had been blown down near a large gap where a powerline had been put in). One way to escape wind is to take shelter from it from something large that won’t be cut down, like a cliff. Ontario’s ancient cedars are located along the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment, world-famous for the cliffs of Niagara Falls.
Protected from the wind and elements on these cliffs, scraggly-looking, half-dead cedars live to be a thousand years. It’s Ontario’s only remaining ancient forest. Located right in the middle of most populous part of Canada. Some people living in the area likely have these ancient trees in their backyard! Thankful the Niagara escarpment area is mostly protected area thanks to the parks, trails, and the Ontario Greenbelt. The Ontario famous, Bruce Trail runs along the escarpment, a trail which I had hiked a few times (and would be doing this summer if not for pandemic), and I had seen these distorted cedars, hanging off cliffs, but at the time had no idea of their age.
Titan now seemed small. I had been hiking into these woods focused on seeing them, when really it was the cedar trees in the surrounding that were the real draw. Cedar trees whose complexity and importance I was only just beginning to understand.
To understand the cedar tree, is to understand the history of Canada. It’s a tree intimately tied to the native genocide that happened here. Without the cedar tree, Canada as the country as we now know it, might never have been built.
Cedar is believed to be the identity of the Annedda Tree, the tree that saved the life of Jaques Cartier — the first European to claim and name Canada — and his men, as they lay dying in their fort during a classically brutal Canadian winter. The son of an Iroquois chief, Domagaia, took pity on them and showed them how eating the inner bark and leaves of the tree they called Annedda that would heal them. Cartier and his men returned to health within a couple days and were in awe of how quickly the cure had worked. It seemed next to magic. The trees became known as Arborvitaes, latin for ‘Tree of Life’.
Cartier immediately realized he had to take some seeds from this tree back to Europe, but, in what is just one of many unnecessary, cruel actions against Native Americans from back then to now, he also decided to kidnap Domagaia, his chieftain father, and others from the tribe — (including small children) — and take them back to France with him. They all promptly died there within a few years of disease.
To have someone save your life and then kidnap them and their family… Canada has much to atone for.
The research suggests that it was Vitamin C deficiency that was ailing Cartier and his men, and that cedar bark and leaves, both high in vitamin c, are what cured them. However, in recent years, cedar as the identity of the Annedda Tree has been disputed. Even though the seeds Cartier returned with germinated and grew in the Royal Garden, a number of other North American evergreens also were planted nearby, and records over which ones were which were lost over the years.
It’s possible it wasn’t the cedar tree. There’s some scholarship from decades after Cartier stating cedar is the identity of Annedda, but modern scholars dispute it largely due to Cartier’s claim the tree was as big as any Oak he had seen in Europe. As discussed, cedar trees are smaller trees. Also, a lot of Canadian evergreens that grow where Cartier was have high levels of vitamin c in their leaves and bark. It’s impossible to tell which tree it was without clinical trials recreating the ‘Cartier and his men dying’ situation, and based on how terrible scurvy is, it’s best any victims of it are cured quickly with current established medicine instead of experimenting with different tree leaves.
I believe cedar is the Annedda tree. I don’t think there is enough reason to doubt the original statement of its identity. As I had discussed above, I think we have a history of underestimating how big ancient trees were. I’ve seen some pretty thick trunk cedar trees in Ontario, and surrounded by other massive trees in an undisturbed environment for thousand of years, I think a cedar could grow pretty big. Also, other Canadian evergreens suggested to be Annedda tree, have very similar leaves to their cousin trees of the same Genus in Europe that Cartier would have been aware of. The lack of comparison to me, suggests a more novel species, and there are no cedar trees where Cartier was from.
Also, saving lives during the winter has long been the role of the cedar tree. Its leaves are the food source that keep deer alive during the winter. Squirrels tear off it’s stringy bark and use it form the structure of their nests where they cuddle to keep warm during the winter. Porcupines eat its inner bark and the sugars there keep its body warm through the winter.
What cedar trees are maybe the best known for is their woods seemingly immortal ability to resist water rot. Other wood will rot pretty quickly if it is constant contact with water. Cedar wood is full of oil, that, while making it pretty flammable (scraps of cedar bark have long been a quick campfire secret), make it extremely resistant to water rot. Cedar wood is still a favourite for roof shingles, decks, fences, and telephone poles.
Cedar was also the framing wood used in the famous Birch Bark Canoes that Native Americans used to travel Canada and what became the transportation vehicle that built the fur trade which built Canada. Europeans quickly disposed of their boats and horses when they saw how versatile, quick, and sturdy these canoes the Natives build were. With strong sheets of birch bark wrapped around a skeleton of cedar wood, punctures in the birch bark from river rocks could be quickly patched during a long journey with replacement bark from other birch trees. The cedar frame was flexible and strong enough not to break after collisions, and most importantly, would not rot in the water and weaken. It was the perfect vehicle with which to travel across Canada. It was technological marvel and had Europeans scrambling to preserve the art of its creation even as they actively tried to kill off Native Americans.
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I recently moved out to Vancouver, British Coloumbia to pursue a Forest Sciences degree at UBC. It’s a big career change for me, but as all the words I’ve written above probably make clear, I’ve fallen in love with trees. There’s as old cliché term about “not seeing the forest for the trees”, that gets used when someone doesn’t see the big the picture. They are seeing the smaller trees, and not the larger forest. Starting to know the trees has made me realize how the reverse of this cliché is literally true for how we see a forest. When we walk in a forest, we see it as a whole and don’t really see the individual trees that make it up. Sure, we might see particularly large ones, like Titan, but we don’t see small cedar trees that surround it. Starting to see these individual trees, to recognize them, feels a bit like I’m Neo seeing the Matrix. When I walk through the woods now, I see so much more than I ever did. It’s a whole new world, one that’s always been there, but I just didn’t look at it close enough (Although admittedly it now takes me forever to walk through even short forest trails).
I’ve one more cedar tree story for you before we go. Before you, hopefully, find a tree identification book and go out looking for cedars. I’ve gone this whole piece just focusing on the Eastern White Cedar of Eastern North America, I need to tell you a little about Canada’s other cedar on the west coast.
I arrived in Vancouver about a month ago at 11am. I had gotten up at 4am to fly here out of Toronto. The four-hour time change meant my eternal clock was at 3pm while in Vancouver time it wasn’t noon yet. I had not slept at all the night before because of excitement. I was exhausted. But there was a tree I had to see. After meeting my landlady and doing a light unpacking, I made a B-line for Pacific Spirt Park, located on the coast of Vancouver near UBC. The closest old-growth forest near me. It was an hour-and-half walk in boiling sun. I was ready to collapse when I arrived, and then I saw it and it was like I was Cartier cured of scurvy. It was an old-growth Western Red Cedar, Thuja plicata.
The Western Red Cedar looks just like its eastern sibling I had left on the other-side of country, but there is one small but big difference, the western red cedar is Canada’s biggest tree.
It’s bark and leaves have the same magical healing powers as it sib. Coastal tribes used it for multiple medical purposes. The wood is incredibly water resistant. Tribes carved huge canoes out of its trunk and it is the main wood used for totem poles. It also can live for an extremely long time, with trees being dated as a thousand years old. However, unlike its smaller sibling, the western red cedar doesn’t grow slowly and quietly, it grows quickly and massively. I’ve invested in a pair of binoculars just so I can get a better look at the top of these trees. Some of the trunks are incredibly surreal, two Titans could fit inside them.
It’s a sight to behold, all these similarities and yet the huge difference size. In B.C. the western red cedar is its provincial tree and they love it here. I can’t help feel just a bit jilted for the eastern white cedar, who is the same tree, but has chosen a strategy for survival that better matches its environment (Ontario doesn’t have the long growing season and rain of Vancouver). While in B.C. the cedars are looked up at with in awe, in Ontario cedar is mostly seen as garden plant used to make hedge fences (Cedar being almost immortal means it makes for a pretty good hedge that can survive heavy trimming). See your cedars, Ontario!
To conclude here, I have to talk about something that you knew was coming. Climate Change. What we are doing to the environment threatens the livelihood of cedar trees. As temperatures rise, the swampy areas cedars love are beginning to vanish. Western Red Cedars are already starting to die off in Southern B.C. as summers become hotter and drier. Ecologists are concerned, saying the death of red cedars is a canary in a coal mine. Red cedars are also a heavily logged tree, their water-resistant wood still a favourite for construction. Massive stumps of ancient cedars cut down from logging still remain scattered through B.C. parks, their rot-resistant wood giving a frozen memory of just how big these cedars can get. A recent report found that only 3% of B.C.’s original old growth forest remains. Between logging and climate change, western red cedar might soon pass from reality to legend.
Sad as it is, a part of me is glad I managed to get out here when I did. To see the size of B.C.’s old-growth trees before they go. I wish I would have got the chance to see Ontario’s. Scholars hundreds of years from now might not believe the stories of the sizes of west coast trees and think them exaggerated just like we now do for Ontario’s ancient trees. Red Cedar might be forced to adopt the survival strategies of its eastern sib to stay alive, hanging half-dead off cliffs where humans won’t disturb it.
