Ontario's Old Growth Forests

Introducing Ontario's old-growth forests

The year is 1615. Samuel de Champlain, Etienne Brule, and 10 Huron are travelling up the Ottawa River by canoe, into a territory largely unknown to Europeans. Not far to the north, at the headwaters of the Ottawa, a seed germinates in a forest gap and grows into a tiny white pine seedling. Champlain and his party soon turn west and head to Georgian Bay... the seedling soaks up the sun and begins to grow. Over the next 375 years it will survive forest fires, windstorms, drought and flood years, and finally in 1989 it will be spared from the chainsaw by mass demonstrations and the arrest of 344 peaceful protestors on Red Squirrel Road, in Temagami.

The year is now 2005, and this tree is protected within the Obabika Lake old-growth forest. But this story has never been fully told, or those of the countless other old-growth forests scattered throughout Ontario. Who'd have thought that dwarf cedar trees growing on the Niagara Escarpment could live to be nearly 2000 years old? Or when you paddle your canoe by small bonsai cedars that line the rocky shorelines of the Canadian Shield, they frequently measure their age in centuries. Not all of our old-growth forests are small, of course. Old-growth pine trees in Temagami can be over 10 stories tall and a metre in diameter. But even they would have appeared small beside the trees of yesteryear, which were as much as 20 stories high, rivalling California's giant sequoias in height.

The story of Ontario's old-growth forests is now being told in a new book. Author and naturalist Michael Henry has teamed up with old-growth ecologist Peter Quinby to produce the book Ontario's old-growth forests: a field guide. The book will include:

This book was supported by Ancient Forest Exploration & Research and its funding partners. Additional information about the book can be found here