Field Notes––

The Wolf Tree Stands Alone

By Dottie Evans

Landscape is dynamic. Present context includes the past. The story of the wolf tree is part of the human story.

 In her book, The Language of Landscape (1998, Yale University Press), Anne Whiston Spirn suggests there is more to see in an undeveloped patch of woods than just trees, vines, and underbrush. There is history behind a stonewall crisscrossing a wooded hillside and evidence of social change in an old oak tree that has grown unaccountably huge amid a forest full of slender young trees.

We are told that by 1840, Connecticut’s first and second growth forest had been harvested and the land dedicated to crops, orchards, or grazing. Looking at old photographs from a century ago, we marvel at the bare, rolling hills with only an occasional tree, stonewall, or farmhouse in view.

We’ve heard old-timers like Charles Botsford, who graduated from Newtown High in 1914, reminiscing during an oral history project about how open Newtown’s farm landscape used to be. How he could look out his upstairs window and see the lights of ships on Long Island Sound some 17 miles to the south.

To visualize such change, we need only walk into the woods and find a wolf tree –– so named because like a lone wolf, it is the last of the old ones left standing. The sheer size of a wolf tree attests to the fact that it once grew by itself in an open field or meadow. With plenty of space and light, it developed a full crown of leaves and spread its branches low and wide in all directions.

So, where did all those slender, tall trees that surround it today come from? They appear similar to each other in size and shape as they stand crowded together, reaching to the sky. We have to assume they sprouted as seedlings at one time in that long-ago open field where the wolf tree was already a dominant feature.

This juxtaposition of wolf tree and young forest is documentation in the language of landscape that there was a particular day sometime in the past when the farmer stopped tilling his field or grazing his cows.

Either that day came at the end of the 1800s when many farms were abandoned, or it was during the First World War when the men left the fields to go to war. During the Depression, families sold off their dairy cows and moved into the cities to find work. In the 1950s, the highways cut through the landscape. Commuters moved back to the countryside and the forest was allowed to return –– except when it was cut down to build more houses and shopping centers.

Although the sunny, open fields of a century ago are gone, the sight of a wolf tree in a dense forest can bring them back –– at least in imagination. One of Newtown’s best-known wolf trees is a white oak that grows in a woods alongside Great Hill Road. The landowner has cut down invasive vines and cleared space around the tree’s roots and upper branches, not only for its health but also for the benefit of passersby.

As I pulled over on Monday afternoon to photograph it, a woman slowed her car down to tell me about the tree.

“My daughter looks at it every time we drive by. She thinks it has a face. We all love looking at it,” she said.

Looking online, I found a collection of essays submitted by students at Williston Central School in Williston, Vt. Their teacher had taken them into the woods and asked them to write down their thoughts about a certain tree that was much bigger than all the others around it. In my opinion, one fifth-grader named Kyle absolutely nailed the assignment.

The tree we went to visit is …called a Witness Tree because it is an old tree that farmers left to grow big…I think this is a boundary marker tree that is over 300 years old, 150’ tall and its circumference is 143 inches. It took four of us kids holding hands to hug the tree. A third grade class at our school was afraid the tree would be cut down, so they asked the president of the University of Vermont to save the tree by preserving it a as landmark.

Wolf Trees or Witness Trees, they’ve made it this far and we can’t help caring what happens to them.