Tapping nature’s bounty: science and sugar maples in the age of improvement MICHAEL GUENTHER Trees played a critical role in shaping the natural and human landscapes of colonial North America. 1 It could be difficult, in fact, to escape their presence. Sprawling woodlands covered much of the eastern half of the continent, beginning with the dense spruce and fir stands of the north- ern boreal forests of Canada, which blended into white pine, hemlock, birch and aspen as one moved further south before giving way to a complex mosaic of northern and central hardwood forests that blanketed New England in a patchwork of oak, chestnut, hickory and pine. This mosaic of trees became even more intricate within the mixed deciduous forests that stretched from the mid-Atlantic to the western Great Lakes, while the southern pinelands covered over 90 million acres of the southeast in longleaf pine, loblolly pine, oak and hickory. 2 More than simply a colourful backdrop, these forests actively shaped the human drama that unfolded during the colonial era. For natives and newcomers alike, woodlands provided a wide range of essential resources for everyday life, from fuel and lumber to clothing, medicine and food. Indeed, trees constituted such an integral part of their mental and material world that the late historian Brook Hindle sought to reconceptualise the period as nothing less than a ‘wooden age’. Like stone and bronze in earlier ages, wood had become more than an essential medium: it conditioned the very structure of life within these communities. 3 And nowhere was this point more visibly demonstrated than on the Great Plains of the nineteenth century, when Euro-American settlers, as well as eastern tribes forced onto reservations, confronted the vast expanses of open grassland and discovered just how difficult it was to 135 1. M. Williams, Americans and their forests: a historical geography (Cambridge, 1989); William Cronon, Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England (New York, 1983), ch.2; Timothy Silver, A New face on the countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in the South Atlantic forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1990), ch.5. 2. Ann Sutton and Myron Sutton, Eastern forests (New York, 1985); Steve Nicholls, Paradise found: nature in America at the time of discovery (Chicago, IL, 2009), ch.7. 3. Material culture of the wooden age, ed. Brooke Hindle (Tarrytown, NY, 1981), ‘Introduction’, p.5. See also America’s wooden age: aspects of its early technology, ed. Brooke Hindle (Tarrytown, NY, 1975).