Sometimes the best way to tell an ancient forest might be by looking not up at the trees, but down at the herbaceous layer. Many of our native woodland plants are intolerant of early-successional conditions, and are also extremely slow colonizers (from our rather fast-paced human perspective on time, at least – I suspect that winter and summer for an old growth forest is more like a night and a day to us). The presence of suites of these plants strongly suggests continuous canopy cover for centuries to me. Unfortunately, the scientific literature on this topic is fairly thin, but those studies I’ve read seem to confirm this impression.

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Once in a while, I stumble upon a patch of Sourlands ancient forest which I suspect may never have been logged at all. Sometimes, a group of incredibly gnarled and eccentric old trees whispers this suggestion to me. Finding large-caliper trees that are decidedly valuable from a commercial perspective is a good way to advance this suspicion into a full-blown hunch. As we continued our hike along the boulder-strewn ridgetop, I noticed amelanchiers, some large and eccentric tupelos, a hickory (pignut, probably) with immensely thick plates of bark, and several large-caliper northern red oaks.

The latter, a choice timber species, made me begin to wonder. Had the logging operation(s?), which seem to have cut the south-facing slope fairly thoroughly, stopped at the boulder-strewn summit? Later, when we got home, we measured our respective “wingspans”, and added the length from Rachel’s fingers to her elbow. 156 inches, or 13 feet, was the circumference of this tree. That equals nearly 50″ in diameter. If at that girth a tuliptree could be even just 220 years old (born 1789), it would likely predate the first serious timbering on the Sourland ridgetop. A surpirisingly precise map of the region by George Cook and C. Vermeule show the Sourland ridgetop as nearly intact forest even in 1888.

I’ve walked a lot of those ridgetop forests, and I can pretty much vouch that there are many that were not clearcut after 1888 either. By that logic, potentially vast stretches of the Sourland ridgetop are then “ancient forest” — not necessarily “virgin” forest, largely unprovable in small patches in the East, but “ancient forest” according to the way the term is used by the English: a forest which may have been selectively harvested at various points in its history, but which has not known the soil disturbance associated with agriculture or the intense shock of commercial clearcutting.

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