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Drug user burns down 3,500-year-old tree

AS HEADLINES go, “Meth user burns fifth-oldest tree in the world” conjures quite the image

DAVIN O'DWYER
Mon Mar 5 2012 - 00:00

AS HEADLINES go, “Meth user burns fifth-oldest tree in the world” conjures quite the image. Florida woman Sarah Barnes accidentally set fire to the landmark known as The Senator, a 38m-tall bald cypress tree in Big Tree Park near Orlando, Florida. Barnes (26), a crystal-meth addict and self-described model, had entered the trunk of the huge tree with a friend on the night of January 16th to take drugs – the tree was a roomy five metres wide.

Unable to see in the dark, she lit a small fire, which in the predictable way of these things got out of control and consumed the old cypress, estimated to be about 3,500 years old.

After the conflagration started, Barnes had the presence of mind to take photographs of the flames on her cell phone from inside the tree, although the images are proving better as evidence than as mementos. Barnes confessed to a friend: “I can’t believe I burned down a tree older than Jesus.”

The Senator is certainly an Old Testament survivor – circa 1,500 BC when it would have started out as a sapling, the pharaohs of Egypt were in their pomp and the Mayans were just beginning to develop their society in South America.

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Which makes it very, very old – but how do they come up with a league table of trees? Saying one particular tree is the fifth-oldest in the world is pretty specific, after all. Tree-ring dating is the most reliable age-verification system, and the current oldest verified tree is Methuselah, an aptly named bristlecone pine in California, which is 4,843 years old. A few venerable giant Sequoias, also in California, have reached the three millennia milestone. The Senator, however, had only an estimated age, and it was deemed a few centuries younger than Llangernyw Yew in Wales, thought to be 4,000 years old. It’s an inexact science counting only those trees that can be measured, however, so that “fifth-oldest tree” label is a tad misleading.

In any case, Barnes was arrested last week for starting the fire, although it’s not clear if there’s a special Florida statute for destroying one of the oldest living things on the planet.