At first sight, humans and trees appear different. But if you saw how trees mature and age, you would agree with me. People and trees mature and grow old in a similar manner.

Neville Lay’s article “Defining Age and Surveying Veteran and Ancient Trees,” has a great diagram showing how trees age. For convenience sake, I’ve drawn up a modified diagram for quick reference.

Both humans and trees start off as zygote, an embryo, a seed. With trees, seeds germinate and pop out of the soil and start growing towards the sun. With humans, the baby is born and starts growing taller until maturity.

Both rapidly grow towards maturity. Usually health and vitality is optimal at this stage. Both are at the physical prime of their lives.

After trees reach maximum size and maturity, trees enter early ancient stage where trees start to shrink in height through crown reduction (bare twigs and branches start to appear above the crown) with an accompanying increase in girth.

Now, this is what I found fascinating: As we age, we also have comparable physiological changes. When we age, we shrink. By 80 years old, men lose, on average, a touch under 2 inches whereas women lose a little over 3 inches. And we all know how many of us increase in “girth” as we reach middle age!

Trees’ crown starts to shrink (crown retrenchment) and sticks and branches of dead wood appear above the crown. Doesn’t this remind you of male pattern baldness?

And like us, these trees can get a facelift! Proper pruning of these ancient trees rejuvenates the tree. The tree might look smaller, but it looks younger and healthier.

There’s a reason why so many of us resonate with trees. We share with them much more than we realise…