Looking down into the boles, you are forced to invert your usual orientation to a tree to understand what you are seeing. Not only the tree’s age (one light and one dark ring together equal one year) but the distinctiveness of its lifespan. Every ring, indentation, and swervy curve evokes that tree’s connection to a sense of place, time and circumstance. In a frequency curve of oak birth-years, for example, a botanist could show that the curve humps every ten years (much as the humps appear in the cedar image below), with each hump originating from some external cause -a scarcity of rabbits, for example. Still, the rings adapt to that change of course, and carry on as usual. - See more at: http://kaufmann-mercantile.com/woodcut-bryan-nash-gill/#sthash.mN5xmGUx.dpuf