Grain of the universe

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 Cold Storage Building at Pier One. This species has the highest resin content of any pine, perhaps because of its natural fire-fighting abilities or perhaps because of a woodpecker species (read more at the link), or maybe in response to both of these environmental stresses. Over time, this resin turns into amber, and this makes the wood, which is made of cellulose, something rich and strange, a combination of cellulose and amber. The result is extremely durable. The warehouse, after all, dated to the 1840s. So you’re eating off of, and sitting on, wood that was cut some 170 years ago, and was already many decades old at that time.

Alas, the Longleaf pines were too successful. What let them survive and thrive was precisely what attracted us. The trees were all cut down, and a habitat thousands of square miles in extent in the Southeast was eradicated. But, by using these virtual fossils, the park does not require the exploitation of living trees today for its furniture. 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.

Such rings are the basis of dendrochronology, which has been used to chart changes in regional climates over thousands of years.