The Children's Book Council T his tree stands in my neighbor's yard about a ten minute walk up the hill from my house. I have tried to draw the tree and the house very accurately. Even the dogs, Joshua and Rebecca, are real dogs. To do the cover illustration I actually made sketches while lying on the ground looking up at this huge maple. Here is a photo from that perspective.
T here are several ways to tell the age of a tree without cutting it down and counting the rings.
Tree experts use a device that drills into the tree and extracts a long core of wood about as big around as a pencil. They can count the rings from this core. I decided to estimate the age of the tree by measuring around it and comparing that measurement to stumps of other sugar maples where I could count the rings. There is lots of logging in the woods here, and so finding good size stumps was fairly easy. Averaging all this data, I calculated that the big tree was a seedling in 1775.