Trees and Forests

I have spent a reasonably large amount of time outside and around trees, but I recently learned about something that is a relatively big deal to me that I never had thought about before.

When a hardwood gets cut down, new saplings grow out of the stump, and this makes the tree have a few trunks that grow up together.  The tree on the far right is hardwood and the tree on the far left is softwood.

Most of New England was clear cut, so as the  forest grows back, it grows back differently because of this characteristic of hardwood. It struck me as a really big impact that we have made. Even though we have a lot of forests, we have a lot of altered forests. I would like, personally, to be able to go somewhere near here, and see really old trees- a whole forest of them, but its something that can't really be done... ( as far as I know.)

In other news, here we have a good example of lack of foresight.