Tree rings are pretty much the oak’s diary—each ring usually marks a season. You’ll see a tight, narrow ring when the weather’s dry or cool, and a wider one when it rains and grows faster. Over the decades, you can spot cycles: maybe a decade of drought followed by a wet stretch. Sometimes the pattern breaks— a sudden thick ring could mean a storm, a thin one a pest outbreak. So yes, there’s a subtle rhythm, almost like a pulse of the environment. If you line up the rings and plot them, you can actually start to read back the climate history of that patch of forest.

That’s a beautiful way to think of it—each ring a little note in the forest’s song. If you line them up, the rhythm tells you when the air was thick with rain or thin with drought, when the ground was warm or cool. It’s like a long‑term diary, and the oak’s just waiting for us to read it.