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To be sure, the sugar maple has uses beyond furnishing matter for meditation to the easily distracted. No tree in New England works harder on man's behalf. It is by no means the biggest tree in our woods; the oldest pines and hemlocks regularly grow taller. It's not the longest-lived; those same pines and hemlocks, and some oaks, go back further. Nor is it our most celebrated, or storied, tree, an honor that must go to the American elm, decimated by disease in recent decades, but whose survivors recall the beloved elms, of which every New England village formerly seemed to have had one, under which George Washington must surely have stopped to refresh himself once upon a time.