When Tom Wessels walks into the woods, he sees a lot more than trees and stones.
At the Woodlawn estate in Ellsworth on a recent morning, the shape of the forest floor showed him where a farmer once plowed; the way stone fencing was constructed revealed that crops were grown there.
Nearby, a large tree amid smaller pines indicated a former pasture for livestock. The forked tops and limb patterns of those pines, burrowed into by the white pine weevil as saplings, tells him these fields were finally abandoned about 50 years ago.
For decades, Wessels has pioneered and publicized this art of “reading the forested landscape” in New England. An author and retired professor now living in Blue Hill, the ecologist is still teaching others how to find these clues – not just to uncover human history, he said, but to help people see the stories of the interconnected relationships at work in nature.
“Really, at its core, it’s about developing an intimacy with a forest,” he said. “You know, if you want to be emotionally intimate with a person, you have to know the history, [things that] have formed them, what created who they are, and it’s the same thing with a forest.”
Humans are hardwired to have relationships with the natural world, he believes, and need those connections to be healthy.
Wessels’ own relationship to the natural world began as a boy on Long Island Sound, where he spent hours in a forest bordering his neighborhood until it was cleared for more houses. He knew the trees only by sight; later, as an undergraduate, he spent his free time in the woods with a bag of field guides, learning the identities of everything he could.
When he was a graduate student in Colorado, a professor introduced Wessels to thinking about the larger patterns and processes at work between those individuals in landscapes.
“That’s what really captured my attention, because I found it so much more interesting,” he said. “…All of a sudden there were stories there to really be sort of uncovered.”
Bringing that approach back as a teacher in New England, with its long agricultural history, was more complicated than the simple and visually obvious forces at work in Colorado: fire, wind, logging. The vegetation was more subtle too; it doesn’t change so clearly here when soil types or topography shift.
Wessels had to essentially teach himself to read clues and solve New England’s forest mysteries. No one had done it before at such a close scale.
Early on, he noticed a forest in Vermont had a smooth floor on one side of a stone wall built to fence in livestock and an uneven surface on the other. Left alone, forest floors are marked by pits and mounds where trees have blown over and been uprooted. Those indentations can stay visible for hundreds of years.
So, Wessels guessed, perhaps the smooth side was once plowed. Historical society records proved it was.
They also gave a sign of the work it took to farm here and build the stone fencing that crisscrosses New England: log books revealed the farmer ate five meals a day totalling around 8,000 calories to fuel hard labor from sunrise to sunset.
The region has more than 250,000 miles of these fences, all built in a period of decades; end to end, they would wrap around the equator 10 times or stretch past the moon, Wessels said.
In southern New England and coastal Maine, they were constructed from the Revolutionary War into the early 1800s as demand for agricultural land grew but not enough trees remained for wooden fencing. Once the end of the French and Indian wars let British settlers move inland, they opened up more fields, and walls there were built from around 1810 to 1845.
Until Civil War-era rail lines connected the country with faster shipping and let Mainers switch to dairy farming, they also grew lots of grain and acres of flax for fabric.
“Double stacked” fencing of two rows of large rocks with small stones in between, or just piles of small stones, indicate a field was used for such crops – the small stones were brought up by freeze-thaw cycles and had to be picked out.
A flat “terrace” on sloping land also indicates it was regularly plowed for crops and soil migrated downhill, whereas an absence suggests a hayfield, plowed less often. An absence of stone piles also points toward a hayfield, where perennial roots held them in place.
Fencing means livestock was present, according to Wessels. Still-lumpy forest floors indicate pasture, as do lone, large trees much older than others around them with large low limbs stretching out: “pasture trees,” left to provide shade for animals.
Wessels outlined how to read these clues and more in his first book, “Reading the Forested Landscape,” released in 1997. It started out as an idea to get a sabbatical from a teaching position using course material he’d developed at the Putney School and Antioch University, where he taught.
The first version didn’t win over a publisher because of the writing style. But years later, encouragement from a coworker to write like he teaches led to a contract and more books.
Reading the Forest Landscape became popular for college nature writing courses; instructors said interpreting clues in a landscape was a parallel for writing stories that contain deeper significance to uncover.
Now retired from teaching, Wessels still regularly gives talks around Maine and leads public walks that reach beyond history and into natural processes at work in the forest.
Woodlawn, a former estate that’s now a museum with public walking trails, holds plenty of examples of agricultural clues.
But Wessels also stopped to point out how an oak tree grows smaller, stiff, notched “sun leaves” high up and softer, broader “shade leaves” below. The sun leaves retain water and, because they are smaller, let light down to the shade leaves, creating a micro growing environment that increases how much the tree can photosynthesize without losing moisture.
A paper birch tree, he explained, is adapted to cold temperatures in several advanced ways. Its white bark reflects sunlight, keeping it from expanding in heat and then contracting rapidly on short winter days, which could cause the tree to crack.
They shed bark to stay white, and horizontal lines called lenticels let them exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide so branches can photosynthesize without leaves. That extends the growing season. And oily bark traps frozen moisture in the winter so the tree doesn’t dry out, which also makes it suitable for canoe building when the inner side faces out.
Lichen clinging to trees is actually a community of three organisms, Wessels added: two species of fungi and one of algae. Trees attract it once they’re too old to photosynthesize through their bark. When it rains, nutrients that lichen have taken out of the air run down the trunk as a liquid fertilizer.
“When I’m doing programs out here, I’m not just doing the landscape history,” Wessels said. “I’m talking about a lot of these co-evolved relationships and a lot of the marvelous things that are happening, because it’s just mind-boggling.”
Many of these interactions help all of the organisms involved, he said, and he believes that nature provides a model for how people should think about their own communities.
“[Nature has] thrived because at its core, it’s always working towards these incredibly complex webs of mutually beneficial relationships,” he said.
