Excerpt:
Shagbark Hickory takes their time.  Very slow to grow, they patiently wait to birth nuts until they are thirty to forty years old. For this reason impatient farmers rarely raise Hickory for produce, but also because their production is notoriously unreliable.  Hickory has long helped us to see into what is going on around them in their ecosystem.  It is said about Hickory nut shells that the thicker the shell, the harder the winter to come.  Hickory buds can alert us to the day of the last frost.  Because they are so slow to bud, they generally appear after the last spring frost, helping farmers to know when to set seeds for reliable harvests. 

Trees live on time scales extended far beyond our own human lifespans.  They live time slowly.  The electrical impulses they need to communicate between parts of themselves and other beings in the ecosystem move at the rate of a third of an inch per minute, a bit more than one and a half feet in an hour, the equivalent of one human footstep.