Christmas ... er, Birthday Tree On Display

It was no doubt a strange site.

A man, on a morning as cold as Friday's, was observed vigorously twisting some sort of object into the side of a large tree.

No, he wasn't a vandal attempting to deface private property. Rather, he was a doctoral student trying to guess the age of the natural object.

The man was Matt Kasson, a Ph.D candidate in Pennsylvania State University's Department of Plant Pathology. And the process is known as dendrochronology, or the dating of trees.

The most common way to date trees is to cut them down and count up the number of rings in the trunk. But cutting down a tree is not always an option. And it certainly isn't the most environmentally friendly one.

Instead, Kasson uses an increment borer, which is hollow and threaded at the tip. The device gets screwed into a tree, leaving a very minimally invasive hole that is barely visible to the naked eye.  

The process allows Kasson, and others like him, to learn a tree's age without really disrupting the living organism.

"We can non-destructively sample them," Kasson said when a reporter caught up with him as he twisted his borer into the tree around 10 a.m. Friday.

On this day, Kasson was checking the age of a species known as the "Tree of Heaven,"  or ailanthus altissima, which sat adjacent to the walkway outside of Drake's Gourmet Foods & Catering on the 8400 block of Germantown Avenue. 

Kasson said he asked the property owner's permission to perform the act, as he often does at various locales throughout the region. He has checked the ages of trees on private property, and at places like Longwood Gardens in Chester County.

Most folks are receptive to his request, he said.

"I haven't been turned down at all," he said with a smile.

The process isn't very lengthy, although it can be hampered by rotting bark. Oftentimes, 20 minutes will suffice.  

At the time of Friday's chat, Kasson had not yet completed the process, but he guessed that this particular tree would turn out to be about 110 years old. The guess was based on a previous "crude estimate," he said.