On wolf trees and the edges of history: How old trees change how I look at the world

Very recently, I was introduced to the concept of a wolf tree, maybe one of the most evocative phrases I’ve learned in recent memory. It sounds so esoteric: is it a tree that wolves gather around? Is it some sort of folkloric emblem? Some kind of myth?

Its actual definition is surprisingly mundane: a wolf tree is a tree that is far older than its surrounding trees in a forest or stand. They are sometimes survivors of logging, left as boundary markers or waypoints. In other cases, they may have once marked the edges of farmers’ fields and provided shade to growing crops. When the fields were abandoned and the forest crept back in, the wolf tree remained as a signifier of how the landscape was once used.

It was previously (and tragically) believed that these trees, so much bigger than the younger trees that surrounded them, threatened forests by drawing in too many resources. Many have been cut down in misguided attempts to improve the health of the forest, in the way that wolves were (and sadly sometimes still are) hunted. 

That’s not true, of course—wolf trees are micro-environments in their own right, providing shelter and food to thousands of creatures, and that’s before we even consider what’s going on with the fungal kingdom around them. And while that environmental impact is so important, that’s not what gets me about these trees.

See, I studied archaeology. I studied archaeology because even as a small kid, I was obsessed—really and truly obsessed, you need to understand—with stuff that was old. I can’t even hypothesise about how this obsession started because it has always been an undeniable part of me, even as early on as I can remember. I loved old items, old houses, old stories, even old rocks. My in-laws’ cottage is built on some of the oldest rock in the world and I still get shivery every single time I stand on it. From this stemmed my love of ghost stories, my desire for storytelling, my interest in genealogy, and, finally, my degree in archaeology.

I got to learn some really incredible things in archaeology (and do incredible things too, like digging up a 3,500 year-old pot), and while I don’t work in that field, I’m grateful that I studied it because it fundamentally altered how I see and understand the world. It took my (semi-secret) natural inclination to animism and gave me the scientific backing to know what I was actually looking at.

For one thing, it taught me how to read landscapes.

Reading landscapes is a fun trick: bring me to an old, half-forgotten cemetery and I’ll waste no time in showing you how to tell where the skeletons are, even if the headstones are long-gone. But it can also give me that shivery, half-feverish feeling too, not unlike how I feel when I’m standing on those old, old rocks that were once the base of incomprehensibly massive mountains at my in-laws’ cottage. 

Anyway, this brings me back to wolf trees.

I’ve found these trees before, though I didn’t have names for them: big old maples or oaks or cedars incongruous with the new growth around them. They stand out on hikes, looming from the distance, and unless you really don’t give a shit about trees (unimaginable!) they’re impossible to miss. They’re usually beautiful, of course. In the heavily-logged forests of Eastern Ontario, a tree that old deserves respect just for being there.

But learning about the concept of wolf trees has given me a whole new lens to look at them through. You see, I live in an agricultural area, so when I’m out hiking it’s not at all rare to come across old half-collapsed stone walls that once marked boundaries. I love these, obviously—I’ve talked before about how I’m drawn to liminality and stepping over these old walls very often feels like stepping between worlds.

Wolf trees are a whole new indicator of these in-between spaces for me to discover: pockets of space that mark old fields and farms and human activity. Did long-dead farmers rest in their shade for lunch? Was a logger particularly struck by them, choosing them as a waymark to spare them the axe? What has that particular tree, long-forgotten in this forest today, signified to people over the course of the past couple centuries?

It doesn’t take an archaeology degree to figure that an old tree in an otherwise-young forest is special, but having a name for them has made them A Thing in my mind. More than just a beautiful tree, they’re now another tangible tool to understand the landscape, the context, the depth of the world around us, another way to place ourselves in history as the inheritors of all the decisions and beliefs and grace and folly of those who came before us.

So I will be looking out for wolf trees now, even more than I already was, and paying homage to the memories they preserve.