Green-Wood Cemetery, like the city at large, lost a mess of trees during Sandy. One of them was this giant, which was also the home of a Red-tailed hawk nest for several years. Judging from Facebook, these pins were probably put in by the Cemetery’s tree specialist, Adam Rychlicki, who has been doing this sort of thing lately. It looks like each pin marks 10 years of growth here, except for what looks like the five years below: 
I was reminded of Madeleine in Vertigo. She’s in Muir Woods with Scottie, and points to a cross-section of a centuries-old redwood, saying “here I was born… and there I died… it was only a moment for you, you took no notice.” Chris Marker quotes the scene silently and still-ly in La Jetée, and, years later, so does Terry Gilliam in 12 Monkeys, somewhat more ponderously but still affectively.
The passing of time is haunting however you look at it.
More of the old-is-new-again Longleaf Yellow Pine in Brooklyn Bridge Park. This time I was looking at the knots and the resulting eddies of tree rings formed around them.
During the last year, you were probably a combination of a little bit nice and a little bit naughty. (Whew! I know I was, but we’ll pass on the details.) Trees, although homophonically knotty, don’t have anything to do with our hominid morality: a knot is basically the root of a branch around which the body of the tree has grown.
So it’s rings within rings.
The Rings of Saturn? No, the benches and tables at newly opened Pier 5 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Like elsewhere in the park, this is recycled Southern Longleaf Yellow Pine (Pinus palustris), which was salvaged from the former 
Each annual ring of growth here is bicolored: the lighter, inner portion being early spring growth, the darker outer portion being summer growth. Even in this small sample, you can see how some years produced wider rings than others, telling of optimal growing conditions. The thinest line here tells of what was probably a hot, dry summer, in which the tree barely grew at all. 
