IN THE FISHLAKE NATIONAL FOREST in Utah, a giant has lived quietly for the past 80,000 years.

The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is an enormous grove of quaking aspens that take the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and makes it literal: the grove really is a single organism. Each of the approximately 47,000 or so trees in the grove is genetically identical and all the trees share a single root system. While many trees spread through flowering and sexual reproduction, quaking aspens usually reproduce asexually, by sprouting new trees from the expansive lateral root of the parent. The individual trees aren’t individuals but stems of a massive single clone, and this clone is truly massive. “Pando” is a Latin word that translates to “I spread.”

Spanning 107 acres and weighing 6,615 tons, Pando was once thought to be the world’s largest organism (now usurped by thousand-acre fungal mats in Oregon), and is almost certainly the most massive. In terms of other superlatives, the more optimistic estimates of Pando’s age have it as over one million years old, which would easily make it one of the world’s oldest living organisms. Some of the trees in the forest are over 130 years old.

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DESOTO NATIONAL FOREST, Miss. — When European settlers came to North America, fire-dependent savannas anchored by lofty pines with footlong needles covered much of what became the southern United States.

Yet by the 1990s, logging and clear-cutting for farms and development had all but eliminated longleaf pines and the grasslands beneath where hundreds of plant and animal species flourished.

Now, thanks to a pair of modern day Johnny Appleseeds, landowners, government agencies and nonprofits are working in nine coastal states from Virginia to Texas to bring back pines named for the long needles prized by Native Americans for weaving baskets.

Longleaf pines now cover as much as 7,300 square miles (19,000 square kilometers) — and more than one-quarter of that has been planted since 2010.

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Have you ever noticed a blooming dogwood in the spring? Relaxed in the shade of a spreading oak on a hot day? Stayed dry under the canopy of a leafy tree during an unexpected downpour? Day in and day out, trees quietly lend a hand in our communities without us giving it much thought.

The list of benefits tree canopies provide is vast — mitigating local flooding, filtering air pollution, reducing polluted runoff, cooling areas prone to extreme heat, creating homes for wildlife, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and more.

Trees are a simple and effective tool to make Virginia neighborhoods more livable while providing a cost-effective option to address environmental concerns. In the upcoming General Assembly session, Virginia legislators should help cities and counties expand those efforts.

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A new assessment of Europe’s remaining old-growth forests – the pockets of undisturbed ancient woodland where humans have had minimal impact – reveals they are in a “perilous state” and lack proper protections.

Scientists from 28 institutions have gathered data and detailed mapping over five years in order to assess the conservation status of these primary forests in Europe, and found many of them continue to be logged.

The research paper describes primary forests as being “composed of native species, where signs of past human use are minimal, and ecological processes, such as natural disturbances, operate dynamically and with little impairment by anthropogenic influences”.

They are critical for conserving forest biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and natural water course management which can help maintain resilient environments.

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Foresters once regarded trees as solitary individuals: They competed for space and resources, but were otherwise indifferent to one another.

The work of the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard upended that. She found that while there is indeed conflict in a forest, there is also negotiation, reciprocity and even selflessness.

Ms. Simard discovered that underground fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest. Seedlings severed from this network are more likely to die; chemical alarm signals to warn of danger can be passed between trees; and a dying tree can sometimes pass on a share of its carbon to neighbors.

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The allure of the James River Park System attracts thousands of visitors to its woods, trails, and shorelines annually. Its 600 acres along the north and south bank of the James River provide flood protection and riparian areas while also providing critical natural habitat for terrestrial and aquatic species being impinged by downtown neighborhoods such as Riverview, which is more commonly known as Maymont due to its adjacent grand-estate namesake.

For some nearby residents, the proximity of the James River Park System is an important factor for choosing a home in the neighborhood. For Chris and Jody Liesfeld, raising their family amidst the setting of the park was a primary goal as they set to build their dream house on Carter Street. Yet as development pressure increased in the area, long-time residents of Riverview began to worry that the attractive natural character of their neighborhood and its nearby parks may be under threat, and the Liesfeld’s purchase only heightened that worry.

“It had been a property neighbors cautiously watched as we witnessed the transformation of surrounding streets,” said Mark Brandon, President of the Maymont Civic League. “We were very suspicious upon learning that someone had bought the property.”

However, to the delight and relief of many neighbors, the Liesfelds share a deep appreciation for environmental stewardship, and as they planned their home, the Liesfelds worked with Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC) to set aside a 3.036-acre area of deciduous woods along the North Bank Trail connector between Texas Beach and Maymont along the historic Kanawha Canal to be protected by a conservation easement in perpetuity. The conservation easement restricts development so that no dwellings can be built and the woodlands will be preserved to protect water quality and native species. Through a separate agreement, the Liesfelds have also committed to combatting the invasive species and removing debris from the property. 

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There is a cautionary tale you hear all too often in environmental planning. An organization visits a neighborhood, identifies an opportunity to build public green space, plants rows of trees, but a year later, many of the saplings die and the residents are left with nothing but sticks.

Whenever this happens, not only are time and resources wasted, but the community members often become stubbornly against any future tree plantings—and understandable so.

Engaging a community before and after trees are planted is a difficult task, but an urban forestry collaborative working in the Carver neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia offers a solution. Here, community members weren’t just the recipients of new trees, but partners providing input and buy-in every step of the way.

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A wooded 13-acre tract straddling Warwick Road in Richmond’s South Side will soon become a city park as part of a deal between the city and a nonprofit land conservancy.

After originally envisioning the area for high-density residential development more than 20 years ago, the city is now considering tentative plans for trails and other park amenities near Thomas C. Boushall Middle School and the Deerbourne and Walmsley neighborhoods.

The nonprofit Capital Region Land Conservancy announced Monday that it will donate the property to the city to help meet a goal of making public park space more accessible for 50,000 city residents.

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At Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, England, the ancestral home of Sir Isaac Newton, sketches drawn by the revolutionary physicist, mathematician, and astronomer still adorn the house’s walls. Outside, a gnarled apple tree has been growing for centuries.

A genetically identical tree is growing at Newton’s alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge. Several more grow at Parkes Observatory in Australia, and another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Descendants and clones of the Woolsthorpe Manor tree dot college campuses and research centers on every continent, except Antarctica. I myself took long college naps under one such tree at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Newton’s Apple Tree,” the plaque read, like many others across the globe. “Grown From An Apple From The Estate of Sir Isaac Newton, Lincolnshire, England.”

Newton’s apple tree holds a special place in the annals of science. In 1665, the just-graduated Newton fled to his family home to avoid a plague outbreak. After observing an apple fall from the then-young tree, Newton considered what force could pull objects in a straight line towards the earth. It was the first step towards his theory of gravity, which he would publish in 1687.

The story is widely believed to be false, like the myth of a child George Washington chopping down a cherry tree with a little axe. But Newton himself said his theory arose from seeing a falling apple while he stayed at Woolsthorpe. In physicist R.G. Keesing’s exhaustive history of Newton’s apple tree, he records sources (from the writer Voltaire to Newton’s niece) relating the tale of the apple tree. Newton may have embellished his story. But due to multiple sources of the tale, Keesing writes, there’s little doubt that there’s a seed of truth to it.

Which tree exactly inspired the theory of gravity? Keesing examined the apple tree still standing in the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor. Regular sketches of Woolsthorpe Manor after Newton’s death continuously show an apple tree in the same spot as the current tree. With no other aged apple trees recorded as growing in the garden, before or after Newton, the Woolsthorpe Manor tree is now widely considered “the one.”

A beetle no larger than a grain of rice is ravaging European forests, infesting and killing trees faster than they can be culled to slow the insects’ spread. It turns out the best way to spot the pests, and stop them, may be from space.

For years, Swedish forestry cooperative Södra has deployed hundreds of foresters to walk the widely spaced spruce on properties it helps manage, monitoring the trees’ bark for drilling holes that are a telltale sign of infestation. But it can take days to assess a single 100-acre estate by foot, and Södra oversees more than five million acres. Last year, the beetles damaged five million cubic meters of lumber, about a quarter of the season’s potential yield, says Johan Thor, an applied physicist and head of data science at the cooperative.

So in early 2019, Södra began working with the Dutch technology company Overstory to find the beetles from above—way above. By matching high-resolution satellite imagery with geographic readings of sick trees as recorded by the company’s harvesters, and integrating other satellite-derived data such as land-surface temperature, they were able to train a model to quickly and accurately locate infested areas. The complexity of the data—with a profusion of tree species and canopy heights—was “a sweet spot for machine learning,” says Overstory’s chief executive officer, Indra den Bakker.

“The preliminary results are really quite astonishing,” says Mr. Thor.

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SINCE 1980, THE UNIVERSITY OF Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center has plumbed the depths of the most macabre of sciences: the decomposition of human bodies. Known colloquially as the Body Farm, here scientists examine how donated cadavers decay, like how the microbiomes inside us go haywire after death. That microbial activity leads to bloat, and—eventually—a body will puncture. Out flows a rank fluid of nutrients, especially nitrogen, for plants on the Body Farm to subsume.

That gave a group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers an idea: What if that blast of nutrients actually changes the color and reflectance of a tree’s leaves? And, if so, what if law enforcement authorities could use a drone to scan a forest, looking for these changes to find deceased missing people? Today in the journal Trends in Plant Science, they’re formally floating the idea—which, to be clear, is still theoretical. The researchers are just beginning to study how a plant’s phenotype—its physical characteristics—might change if a human body is composing nearby. “What we’re proposing is to use plants as indicators of human decomposition, to hopefully be able to use individual trees within the forest to help pinpoint where someone has died, to help in body recovery,” says UT Knoxville plant biologist Neal Stewart, coauthor on the new paper.

As a large mammal like a human decomposes in a forest, its breakdown transforms the soil in a number of ways. The body’s “necrobiome”—all the bacteria that was already in it when it was alive—replicates like crazy in the absence of an immune system. This necrobiome mixes with the microbes in the dirt. “The soil microbiome will change and, of course, the plant roots will also sense some changes,” says Stewart. But, he adds, “we don’t really know what those changes are.”

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Every few years my mother would buy a different version of the same book, only to abandon it after several weeks: How to Identify the Trees of Northeastern America. With the regularity of a trans-hemispheric weather cycle, she’d come home, drop what appeared to be a travel brochure to the Republic of Trees on the table, and proclaim: “This time I’m going to learn the names of the goddamn trees.” She never did.

Growing up amid this excess of tree-based literature I at least learned to distinguish maple from oak, beech from elm, spruce from pine. But even long after my mother died, my taxonomic view of trees remained arrested in something like a primary color filter of the world: I knew there were thousands of them, but I could only name six. Until the arrival of a pandemic.

This new cycle of family obsession began with the eastern redbud outside my window, or as I’d often called it, the “pink flowery one”. In mid-March, along with much of the world, I found myself stuck at home, no longer making the 100-mile train trip south to New York City for work. As infection rates climbed, and we began to count deaths along with new cases, the eastern redbud burst into bloom, scandalously pink flowers in brash contradiction of its name. My nine-year-old, who has spent endless afternoons tucked into the boy-shaped crook of this tree, asked what it was called. With all the unearned confidence of my mother I blurted out the first word my glitchy dial-up of a mind could locate: “Lilac.”

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In early april, Paul Hiley was kicking back in the executive suite at Desert King International LLC, gazing out the window at the San Diego sunshine and daydreaming about his golf game. California had issued its initial stay-at-home order for COVID-19, but apart from the hand sanitizer around the office, life was more or less normal. Retirement was on the horizon for Hiley. Maybe he’d sell the business. Maybe his son, Damian, would take over.

For more than 42 years, Hiley has been a leading purveyor of certain plant-based food additives such as saponins, foaming agents used in root beer and Slurpees. Most of us never think about these compounds, and Hiley has always liked it that way. “My theory of business is the only two people who need to know my name are my wife and my banker,” he told me recently.

Then, one day—April 14th, to be exact—his son told him that they had a call with Stanley Erck. Erck is the CEO of Novavax, a Maryland-based maker of vaccines. Not a seller of vaccines, mind you: The company had yet to bring one of its candidates to market. But like other companies around the world, Novavax had thrown its hat into the coronavirus-vaccine race. And its success, Erck believed, depended on that odd ingredient in Slurpees.

The inner bark of the Chilean soapbark tree, Quillaja saponaria, is the source material for some of these saponins. Pulverized and soaked in water at the Desert King factory in Chile, the bark is transformed into a brown, bitter, bubbly fluid. This precious goo does many things well, and it happens to be the raw material for one of the world’s most coveted vaccine adjuvants: QS-21. Adjuvants are compounds that boost the body’s immune reaction to a vaccine. Owing to their potential risks to human health, however, only a handful of adjuvants have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and QS-21 is one of the newest.

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A chestnut tree that miraculously survived the shelling of Ypres and the combined horrors of two world wars has been named the winner of Belgium’s Tree of the Year competition and celebrated as an enduring symbol of survival in the face of adversity.

The tree, which British Tommies marched past on their way to the front, was badly damaged during the First World War in bombardments that razed the Belgian city to the ground. 

Incredibly the tree survived the shelling, which lasted from October 1914 to September 1918, as it was protected by the city walls.

The tree was planted in 1860 on the eastern rampart of the medieval Flemish city’s fortifications, and its root structure was strong enough to help the tree recover.

It grew back with four separate trunks as Ypres was painstakingly rebuilt after being obliterated by German bombardments, and the base trunk now has a 9.2m circumference. 

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We met on a recent morning for a walk in the woods.

“This has always been one of my favorite places,” said McChesney “Ches” Goodall III as we set off.

Goodall knows a good forest when he sees one: He’s a forester by training and co-founder of Virginia Forestry and Wildlife Group, a natural resource consulting firm.

He and his son began exploring these woods — behind the Carillon and Dogwood Dell amphitheater in Byrd Park — years ago.

“It was amazing,” he recalled. “There were hardly any trails. It was this kind of forgotten block of mature woods that no one seemed to visit … an old-growth forest with a beautiful creek. A peaceful place in the middle of the city.”

There was also something else about this part of the park, officially known as Dogwood Dell, though Goodall likes to refer to it as Carillon Woods: It was suffocatingly overgrown with ivy, kudzu and all sorts of other invasive species. The trees, some dating to the 1800s and many covered with vines reaching up into their tops, were choking to death.

Click here to read the rest of Bill Lohmann’s article in the Times-Dispatch.

In the Malian bush, a scattering of acacia trees grow through the wild grass and shrubs that spread for miles across the semi-arid scrub. Herders graze cattle nearby and local people fetch firewood. The acacias are among the taller and faster-growing trees of this habitat, with old individuals reaching high above the surrounding scrub.

This is the Sahel, a savannah that stretches across six countries in mainland West Africa. This dry strip of land between the tropical rainforests to the south, and the Sahara to the north, sees just three months of rain a year. It’s a region that is changing quickly. Climate change has seen the Sahara Desert grow around 100km (62 miles) southward since 1950, and is expected to continue the same trend in the coming decades.

But the Sahel’s acacia trees, growing close to the boundary of the desert, are at the heart of a reviving ancient trade with the potential to stem the advance of the Sahara.

To see what is special about these trees, you have to tear off a strip of bark or make a small incision into the tree. The sap that exudes from the wound is a pinkish substance that dries into a round springy ball. This is gum arabic, and it comes from two species of tree found in the Sahel: Acacia senegal and Acacia seyal.

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The fire that galloped down the canyon along the North Santiam River last week charred tall firs to matchsticks and coated the survivors’ needles in dull, sepia-gray ash.

The blaze claimed some of the Douglas firs that Fred Girod and his father planted in 1968, along with the old family house that overlooked the river. It claimed the maples and oak where bald eagles and osprey would settle, visible from Mr. Girod’s bedroom window.

“I can rebuild the home,” Mr. Girod, a Republican state senator who represents this area, said this past week, as smoke rose from a hole where his back door had been. “I can’t rebuild the setting.”

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John Bunker normally searches for heirloom apple trees in the fields and forests of rural Maine, but on a trip to Boston, he stumbled upon one in an unexpected place: an ice-cream-parlor parking lot. An expert on American heirloom apples, particularly those of Maine, Bunker has been investigating, preserving, and growing nearly forgotten apple cultivars since he graduated college and immediately bought a parcel of Maine farmland in the 1970s.

“I could spend the rest of my life studying, tracking down, learning to identify, and preserving historic apples from Maine, and I’d never run out of something to do,” says Bunker, who grows the rare apple trees at his family-run Super Chilly Farm, and sells them through Fedco Seed Cooperative.

The parking-lot apple tree was a rare find for Bunker, who mostly searches the woods and fields of sleepy New England towns. Apple trees can stand watch in quiet forest hollows for two centuries, remembered only by neighborhood elders. But these days, Bunker says, old urban apple trees “are mostly gone.” So Bunker got into the habit of visiting the ice-cream-parlor tree. “One year, when I stopped by—oops, it had been cut down,” he says.

The parable of the parking-lot apple tree, which survived decades of urban development before finally succumbing to the saw, embodies the trajectory of New England’s heirloom fruits as a whole.

Boston’s reputation as an epicenter for heirloom fruit dates back to 1623. That was the year European settlers planted their first apple orchard on the land of the Massachusett tribe, in what is now Boston’s posh Beacon Hill neighborhood. There were apple relatives in the New World before European colonization, but the ancestors of the fruits we eat today originated in Central Asia, entered Europe through the Silk Road, and were brought to North America by Europeans. Settlers developed dozens of new fruit cultivars, but apples were the most important, offering colonists cider and sustenance through the brutal New England winters.

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Have you ever heard of the Old Grown Forest Network? Their mission is to create a network of forests across the U.S., with one in each county where forests can grow, open for visitors and never logged, and a network of people inspired to protect them.

A long-standing debate over the value of old forests in capturing and storing carbon has prompted a surge of studies published in top science journals during the last decade. Here are seven emerging points that are supported by solid evidence.

1. Trees accumulate carbon as long
   as they live
2. Old-growth forests accumulate and store vast quantities of carbon
3. Old forests accumulate carbon in soils

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Richmond officials announced plans this past Monday to create five new green spaces south of the James River.

The proposed green spaces will be created using 36 acres of city-owned land. Mayor Levar Stoney made the announcement alongside 8th District Councilwoman Reva Trammell. Along with Councilman Mike Jones, the three plan to introduce an ordinance making the green space designations official later this month. 

Brianne Mullin, who heads Richmond’s Office of Sustainability, said the city chose the locations in Southside using data on heat islands and park access.

“We used these tools to identify where [there are] those who are more at risk due to climate change, who live in areas of the city that experience more extreme heat and those without access to a vehicle who may not have the ability to get to a cooler green space to seek relief,” Mullin said. 

The city’s next steps after approval from Richmond City Council will be to hold community meetings to see if they want the green spaces turned into parks, trails or community centers. Until that’s done, it’s unclear how much the proposal will cost.

The Trust for Public Land identified several areas in Richmond where park access is limited. According to city officials, Richmond currently uses only six percent of its land for parks and recreation, compared to the nationwide median of 15 percent.

On a warm day in March 1982, biologist Francis “Jack” Putz strayed into a knot of black mangrove trees seeking relief from the afternoon heat. Drowsy from his midday meal and hours of fieldwork in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste National Park, Putz decided to lie down for a short siesta.

As he gazed skyward, the wind stirred the tops of the mangroves above him, causing the limbs of neighboring trees to claw at each other and snap off some of their outermost leaves and branches. Putz noticed that this reciprocal pruning had left tracks of empty space running through the canopy.

This network of treetop chasms, called crown shyness, has been documented in forests around the world. From the mangroves of Costa Rica to the towering Borneo camphor trees of Malaysia, gaps in the greenery abound. But scientists still don’t fully understand why the tops of trees so often refuse to touch.

Beneath the mangroves 40 years ago, teetering on the verge of a post-lunch snooze, Putz reasoned that trees need personal space, too—a critical step toward unraveling the roots of the branches’ bashful behavior.

“I often make great discoveries at naptime,” he says.

Today, a growing body of work continues to support the early observations of Putz and his colleagues. Wind, it seems, plays a crucial role in helping many trees maintain their distance. The boundaries carved by bouts between branches may improve the plants’ access to resources, such as light. Gaps in the treetops might even curb the spread of leaf-munching insects, parasitic vines, or infectious disease.

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Campaigns to plant huge numbers of trees could backfire, according to a new study that is the first to rigorously analyze the potential effects of subsidies in such schemes.

The analysis, published on June 22 in Nature Sustainability, reveals how efforts such as the global Trillion Trees campaign and a related initiative (H. R. 5859) under consideration by the U.S. Congress could lead to more biodiversity loss and little, if any, climate change upside. The researchers emphasize, however, that these efforts could have significant benefits if they include strong subsidy restrictions, such as prohibitions against replacing native forests with tree plantations.

“If policies to incentivize tree plantations are poorly designed or poorly enforced, there is a high risk of not only wasting public money but also releasing more carbon and losing biodiversity,” said study co-author Eric Lambin, the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “That’s the exact opposite of what these policies are aiming for.”

There is no question that forests have an outsized role to play in efforts to slow global biodiversity loss and combat climate change by sequestering carbon as biomass. So it makes sense that tree-planting as a solution has gained traction in recent years with ambitious commitments, such as the Bonn Challenge, which seeks to restore an area of forest more than eight times the size of California by 2030, and Trillion Trees, which seeks to plant as many trees as its name implies.

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PALMYRA ATOLL IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC OCEAN—Duncan Coles lops the head off a juvenile coconut tree with a practiced swing of his machete. He and nine other volunteers chop away at the thicket, stepping over piles of fallen coconuts and fist-size hermit crabs. Soon they return to their decapitated kills, dousing each stump with blue-dyed herbicide. Two other volunteers use power drills to set upon the mature coconut trees towering overhead, boring holes and filling them with shots of herbicide.

The slashing and poisoning is part of an unprecedented endeavor to rid this remote atoll of all but a few coconut palms (Cocos nucifera). The gangly tree is an icon of idyllic tropical islands, but also an aggressive invasive species that crowds out native plants and animals. By removing 99% of Palmyra’s millions of palms, biologists hope to create more room on the atoll’s three dozen islets for indigenous forests and seabirds, including the world’s second largest colony of red-footed boobies. If all goes as intended, the restoration effort could help make this coral-ringed atoll, which has an elevation of just 2 meters, more resilient to sea-level rise and other ravages of climate change.

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BOULDER CREEK, Calif. — When a massive wildfire swept through California’s oldest state park last week it was feared many trees in a grove of old-growth redwoods, some of them 2,000 years old and among the tallest living things on Earth, may finally have succumbed.

But an Associated Press reporter and photographer hiked the renowned Redwood Trail at Big Basin Redwoods State Park on Monday and confirmed most of the ancient redwoods had withstood the blaze. Among the survivors is one dubbed Mother of the Forest.

“That is such good news, I can’t tell you how much that gives me peace of mind,” said Laura McLendon, conservation director for the Sempervirens Fund, an environmental group dedicated to the protection of redwoods and their habitats.

Redwood forests are meant to burn, she said, so reports earlier this week that the state park was “gone” were misleading.

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This is a video report. Click here to watch.

Fifteen million trees were felled by “The Great Storm” which hit the south of England in 1987. But the remarkable Turner’s Oak in Kew Gardens in London not only survived the storm, but also changed the way that trees are cared for around the world.

Tony Kirkham, head of the Arboretum at Kew Gardens has been telling BBC Witness History about what he learned from the ancient oak.

This is a video report. Click here to watch.

When an atomic bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, hundreds of thousands of people were killed and injured.

Despite many survivors believing nothing would grow in the city for decades, 170 trees survived and are still growing 75 years later.

Green Legacy Hiroshima is a project that sends seedlings from those trees around the world, spreading a message of hope.

Tomoko Watanabe is a co-founder of the project and spoke to Witness History. Click here to watch.

Trees do not pay taxes. Some seem to avoid death as well. Many of the world’s most ancient organisms are trees, including a 3,600-year-old cypress in Chile and a sacred fig in Sri Lanka that was planted in the third century B.C. One bristlecone pine known as Methuselah has been alive for nearly five millenniums, standing in a forest in what is now called California.

But according to a paper published Monday in the journal Trends in Plant Science, time ravages us all in the end. The paper, “Long-Lived Trees Are Not Immortal,” argues that even the most venerable trees have physiological limits — though we, with our puny life spans, may never be able to tell.

Sergi Munné-Bosch, a plant biologist at the University of Barcelona, wrote the article in response to a January study on ginkgo trees, which can live for over a thousand years. The study found that 600-year-old ginkgos are as reproductively and photosynthetically vigorous as their 20-year-old peers. Genetic analysis of the trees’ vascular cambium — a thin layer of cells that lies just underneath the bark, and creates new living tissue — showed “no evidence of senescence,” or cell death, the authors wrote.

Dr. Munné-Bosch said he found the paper “very interesting,” but disagreed with how some readers of the study in popular media and beyond had interpreted it.

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An hour’s drive south of San Francisco, a stand of several hundred poplars grows in a Y-shape — a rather unusual sight wedged between two baseball fields. The trees were planted in 2013 to suck carcinogens out of a 1,500-acre Superfund site contaminated by the U.S. Navy, which disposed of toxic waste generated from developing military aircraft into ponds and landfills.

The Naval Air Station at Moffett Field is one of more than 1,000 Superfund sites in the U.S., the legacy of decades of industrial pollution. Cleanup of these sites is expensive, often owing to the specialized machinery and tools needed to excavate and dredge the land. And the moving of contaminated soil to landfills or the pumping and filtering of systems used to decontaminate water can themselves be disruptive to the environment.

But just by living and continuing to grow, the poplars, in Mountain View, Calif., can slurp up about 50 gallons of toxic water a day and break it down into innocuous byproducts such as carbon dioxide and chloride.

The poplars are part of a wave of advances in phytoremediation, the process of using plants to clean up toxic soil or water. They arise from work by Sharon Doty, a plant microbiologist at the University of Washington, who identified the microbes that naturally colonized poplars. She then licensed those strains of microbes to Intrinsyx Environmental, which gave the poplars in Mountain View a boost to enable the trees to survive and even thrive in a toxic landscape.

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In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, there is space enough for trees to grow—and space enough for 2 million residents to plant truckloads of trees while social distancing.

Although the virus has spread fast throughout the country, its threat was not enough to dissuade the government of the most-populous Indian state from conducting a mass tree-planting campaign along the banks of the river Ganges as part of its pledge to shade a third of the nation under tree cover by 2030.

The nation’s target acreage of 235 million acres would represent an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.

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The forest floor is a graveyard, covered with fallen spruce and oak trees. But beneath the broken limbs and rotting leaves, thousands of species of insects are feeding in Bialowieza Forest. Fungi of many types are found only here and sprout year-round. More are discovered every year.

More than 200 species of birds, including rare woodpeckers and owls, fill the air with song.

“There is more life in a dead spruce than a living one,” says Professor Rafal Kowalczyk, the leader of the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, during a tour of the forest – one of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests and part of an ecosystem largely untouched since the last glaciers receded from the continent more than 10,000 years ago.

It has been more than a year since the European Court of Justice ordered an end to logging in the forest, finding that it posed a clear threat to the world heritage site.

The scars, though, are still visible – from the tracks gouged into the earth by the heavy machinery used to cut down thousands of ancient trees to the gaping holes in the canopy created by their removal.

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RIO DE JANEIRO — Since coming to office, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has enabled increased razing of the Amazon rainforest.

Now, the coronavirus has accelerated that destruction.

Illegal loggers, miners and land grabbers have cleared vast areas of the Amazon with impunity in recent months as law enforcement efforts were hobbled by the pandemic.

Those recently cleared areas will almost certainly make way for a rash of fires even more widespread and devastating than the ones that drew global outrage last year. The newly cleared patches are typically set ablaze during the drier months of August to October to prepare the land for cattle grazing, often spiraling out of control into wildfires.

“The trend line is shooting upward compared to a year that was already historic in terms of a rise in deforestation,” said Ana Carolina Haliuc Bragança, a federal prosecutor who leads a task force that investigates environmental crimes in the Amazon. “If state entities don’t adopt very decisive measures, we’re looking at a likely tragedy.”

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WITH ITS SOMETIMES-SWAMPY LANDSCAPE STIPPLED with soaring cypresses, Congaree National Park in central South Carolina looks like a prehistoric diorama. And occasionally it also resembles a Lisa Frank folder come to life. When conditions are right, standing water appears orangey, blue, and pinky-red—hues usually reserved for garish school supplies or swirls of melted sherbert on a hot day.

The sheen comes from oil, but isn’t the product of a spill or other industrial mess-up. Rather, the “oil-slick sheen” comes from Taxodium—the genus of water-loving conifers in the cypress family—which produce massive quantities of resin and oils, says Az Klymiuk, collections manager of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago. The iridescence comes from oils freed up through decay, they say, that then float and coat the surface.

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Sometime in 1989, Herbert Darling got a call: A hunter told him he had come across a tall, straight American chestnut tree on Darling’s property in Western New York’s Zoar Valley. Darling knew that chestnuts were once among the area’s most important trees. He also knew that a deadly fungus had all but wiped out the species more than a half-century earlier. When he heard the hunter’s report of having seen a living chestnut whose trunk was two feet thick and rose to the height of a five-story building, he was skeptical. “I wasn’t sure I believed he knew what one was,” Darling says.

When Darling found the tree, it was like beholding a mythical creature. “To be so straight and perfect a specimen — it was just outstanding,” he says. But Darling also saw that the tree was dying. It had been struck by the same blight that had, starting in the early 1900s, killed an estimated three billion or more of its kind, modern history’s first major tree-destroying disease spread by man. If he couldn’t save the tree, Darling figured, he would at least save its seeds. There was just one problem: The tree wasn’t making any, because there were no other chestnut trees nearby to pollinate it.

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Despite our best intentions, humans can be awful recordkeepers. There are personal biases and faulty memories to consider, older means of documentation that can decay or crumble (thereby jumbling any meaning there was to begin with), and so many other inherent hazards. So it’s no wonder that hazier parts of the historical record require an entirely different species of historian.

Increasingly, American researchers are turning to trees, and reading them to fill in the gaps. A new study, published in the Journal of Biogeography, looks at the tree rings of West Virginia’s historic log cabins and other wooden structures to better understand the period in which they were built. It’s just the latest example of what the science of dendrochronology can tell us.

As trees grow each year, they sprout new rings of tissue under their bark. These rings are formed by the rate at which trees grow over the course of the calendar year—slower in winter, when there aren’t many nutrients, and faster in the spring and summer. Each new ring, a testament to the tree’s survival, encircles the older ones, inscribing a hidden historical record beneath the bark, in concentric circles.

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THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS SHUTTERED countless workplaces for the foreseeable future. But a botanic garden isn’t like most offices: The flowers and trees that live there don’t pay any mind to human health or anxieties, and they need a hand from their caretakers, especially at this time of year. “Right now is the season when everything has to happen with garden collections,” says Tim Johnson, director of the botanic garden at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

At Smith, students are learning remotely, and the college grounds are closed to the public, but the plants and trees are of course staying put. The botanic garden team is navigating the thorny question of how to take care of them in an era of social distancing. “Everything is waking up, everything is demanding attention, from the indoor collections to the outdoor collections,” Johnson says.

To keep up with botanic gardens from a distance, you can peruse the Morton Arboretum’s at-home educational offerings or check in on the Conservatory of Flowers’s current stunners, including the giant water lily. The Smith College Botanic Garden and Chicago Botanic Garden are both blooming on social media. In the meantime, Atlas Obscura asked four botanic garden employees (including two Tim Johnsons—no relation!) how they’re caring for their leafy green charges in the midst of a tumultuous spring.

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Destruction of tropical forests worldwide increased last year, led again by Brazil, which was responsible for more than a third of the total, and where deforestation of the Amazon through clear-cutting appears to be on the rise under the pro-development policies of the country’s president.

The worldwide total loss of old-growth, or primary, tropical forest — 9.3 million acres, an area nearly the size of Switzerland — was about 3 percent higher than 2018 and the third largest since 2002. Only 2016 and 2017 were worse, when heat and drought led to record fires and deforestation, especially in Brazil.

“The level of forest loss we saw in 2019 is unacceptable,” said Frances Seymour, a fellow with the environmental research group World Resources Institute, which released the deforestation data through its Global Forest Watch program. “We seem to be going in the wrong direction.”

“There has been so much international effort and rhetoric around reducing deforestation, and companies and governments making all these commitments that they are going to reduce by half their tropical forest loss by 2020,” said Mikaela Weisse, who manages the Global Forest Watch program. “The fact that it’s been so stubbornly persistent is what’s worrying to us.”

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For a tree too big to wrap your arms around, the California coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, is surprisingly elusive. Their bases might be elephantine, but the upper reaches, they’re lofty, inscrutable. It’s this zone that I’m preparing to enter, a fog-shrouded crown on the northern California coast. A guide cinches me into a harness, and before I know it, I’m 140 feet up, then 150, 160. I stare at the tree’s dark, gnarled bark to quell the vertigo rising in my temples.

By the time I’m about 20 stories off the ground, the dot-sized people staring up at me are gone, replaced by intertwined branches and needles that close around me like a net. Clumps of sage-colored moss dangle and an inexplicable calm descends. Somewhere, my mind is scrambling like a squirrel, aware that I’m dangling 200 feet off the ground, but the tree’s unrelenting solidity—it’s been here since before the Magna Carta, after all—is having an effect. There’s a stillness up here that passes understanding.

I should have seen this coming. It’s just the way David Milarch described it. Milarch’s singular goal in life is to bring these primeval forests back from the brink, and he knows just how to win people to his cause. The best baptism is the experience. I see it in the faces of others after they return from a crown visit: blooming cheeks, starry eyes, deep sighs. They’ve gotten big tree religion.

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Cities usually come at the price of green space. Since prehistoric times, humans have busily cleared forests to make way for settlements. But increasingly, greenery has been edging its way back into modern urban landscapes, and for good reason. Vegetation helps cities become better habitats for wildlife and for people, and it helps to make city air safer.

Trees have a remarkable range of traits that can help reduce urban air pollution, and cities around the world are looking to harness them. In January 2019, the mayor of London announced that 7,000 trees would be planted before the end of the following year. Meanwhile, China’s Hebei Province, home to Beijing, has been working on a “green necklace” of plants that could help reduce pollution from factories that surround the capital. And Paris is planning an urban forest that will encompass its most iconic landmarks in an effort to adapt to climate change, and also improve the city’s air quality.

While trees are generally effective at reducing air pollution, it isn’t as simple as the more trees you have in an urban space, the better the air will be. Some trees are markedly more effective at filtering pollutants from the air than others. To make the most difference in air quality in a street or city, it has to be the right tree for the job.

And, of course, trees are only a way to filter pollution; better is to reduce emissions of pollutants in the first place, notes David Nowak, a senior scientist at the US Forest Service who has been studying plants’ contribution to air quality for 30 years. “But trees can be of great help,” he says.

Trees can improve air quality in direct and indirect ways. Indirectly, they can help by shading surfaces and reducing temperatures. If buildings are shaded by trees, it reduces the need for conventional air conditioning, and the emissions of greenhouse gases that come with it. Plus, lower temperatures decrease risk of harmful pollutants like ground level ozone that commonly spike on hot days in urban areas.

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Years ago, my family hiked into the Navajo Nation forest with a medicine man in search of a tree that could act as an intermediary to the Creator. It had to be sturdy enough to match our prayers for positive growth and young enough to have time to mature so its protection could last a lifetime. The medicine man selected a young Douglas fir that had no blemishes, bends, or twists. It was perfect.

We offered the little fir gifts that signified our gratitude. My husband and son placed turquoise while my daughter and I laid a white shell near its trunk. We sprinkled corn pollen on its needles to honor our lives as part of nature.

When I was 21, my birth mother died of cancer. Seeking grounding, I turned to the natural world, and soon, to the indigenous people most connected to it. In this way, I met Ursula Knoki-Wilson of the Táchii’nii, who adopted me as the daughter she never had and hired the medicine man for my Blessingway Ceremony. Later, I was adopted by Elaine Abraham’s family of the Naa Tláa of Yéil Naa, K’inéix Kwáan from the Tsisk’w Hit of Yakutat, Alaska, who named me Guna Kadeit Seedi Shaawat. My relatives taught me that everything has a spirit and needs to be respected.

Trees are people to be negotiated with and lived with on shared terms. Their lessons are available to anyone who hikes among the forest with an open heart, and listens.

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For the thousands of people around the world who’d once visited and admired the world’s largest treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee, the news came as an awful shock. In October 2019, a blaze consumed the singular construction. But for Horace Burgess, the treehouse’s architect, this is just how things go. He was well acquainted with how it feels to lose your own, self-built treehouse in an angry conflagration. Heck, he’d already burned one down himself.

“It was just evil,” says Burgess of the older treehouse he built and then razed back in the 1980s. There was “no good about it.” The house had ended up serving as Burgess’s hideaway for doing drugs, which he committed to quitting after the deaths of some friends. Trouble was, the house itself had become part of the habit. A voice came to Burgess, saying that he had to burn the house down if he was going to rebuild his life. And it wasn’t just any voice.

People typically think “you’re a little bit crazy when you say that God spoke to you,” Burgess admits, “but really he’s the one that tells us to put our pants on in the morning.” Looking back, Burgess says that burning that first treehouse down—on God’s advice—was “probably the most sane moment in my life.”

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Copenhagen is rethinking the way we enjoy our time in our city park.

City parks all over the world are wonderful places to enjoy green spaces while still enjoying urban life. However, in Copenhagen, architects and designers are looking for ways to use the city’s unused space in a different way.

Copenhagen Islands, a project headed up by Danish studio Fokstrot and Australian architect Marshall Blecher, has launched the first of many floating parks in the city’s harbor.

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Researchers say the economic costs of a deadly pathogen affecting olive trees in Europe could run to over €20 billion.

They’ve modelled the future worst impacts of the Xylella fastidiosa pathogen which has killed swathes of trees in Italy.

Spread by insects, the bacterium now poses a potential threat to olive plantations in Spain and Greece.

The disease could increase the costs of olive oil for consumers. Xylella is considered to be one of the most dangerous pathogens for plants anywhere in the world. At present there is no cure for the infection.

It can infect cherry, almond and plum trees as well as olives.

It has become closely associated with olives after a strain was discovered in trees in Puglia in Italy in 2013.

The organism is transmitted by sap-sucking insects such as spittlebugs.

The infection limits the tree’s ability to move water and nutrients and over time it withers and dies.

In Italy, the consequences of the spread of the disease have been devastating, with an estimated 60% decline in crop yields since the first discovery in 2013.

“The damage to the olives also causes a depreciation of the value of the land, and to the touristic attractiveness of this region,” said Dr Maria Saponari, from the CNR Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in Italy.

“It’s had a severe impact on the local economy and jobs connected with agriculture.”

As well as in Italy, the Xylella bacterium has now been found in Spain, France and Portugal.

Tackling it at present involves removing infected trees and trying to clamp down on the movement of plant material and the insects that spread the disease.

But if these measures fail, what will be the financial impact of the infection? Click here to read more…

Joshua trees face the risk of extinction after decades of development, drought and more frequent wildfires due to climate change in their Mojave Desert stronghold, according to California state wildlife authorities who are recommending that the trees be considered for listing as an endangered species.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife on Monday said it based its recommendation on a review of a petition submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity, which argues that the western Joshua tree’s spindly desert woodlands are “likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future” without protection under the California Endangered Species Act.

The fate of Joshua Tree National Park’s namesake plant is now in the hands of the state Fish and Game commissioners. They are to decide in June whether to accept the department’s recommendation and declare the tree a candidate for listing. If the trees are listed, the law requires state wildlife managers to devise a recovery plan for them, which could limit development on some of Southern California’s sunniest real estate.

A final decision is expected sometime next year. Click here to read more…

If you have ever noticed small holes, made in neat rows on the trunk of a tree, you are probably looking at the damage caused from a yellow bellied sapsucker.

Sapsuckers are a type of woodpecker, but are smaller than the usual woodpeckers. Both birds use their beaks to tap on tree trunks to make holes. Sapsuckers make lots of small holes in horizontal or vertical lines in the trunks of trees. Woodpeckers make larger holes in different spots up and down tree trunks. These holes are referred to as sap wells.

Sapsucker and woodpecker damage is usually found on trees that are stressed from some sort of disease or physical wounds. Both birds seem to really love young live oaks, although I have often seen sapsucker damage on older live oaks.

When a tree experiences stress caused by humans, animals or any other means, sugars from the tree’s sap will concentrate in the area to help repair the problem. Many types of insects and animals, including sapsuckers, detect the sweet tree sap and will be attracted to the area.

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The rosewood tree is one of the most trafficked species on earth. When it’s cut it bleeds a blood-red sap, thus the name “Blood Tree.”

Having exhausted stocks elsewhere, Chinese traders have turned to West Africa. This video report by BBC Africa Eye comes from Senegal where it is illegal to fell or export a Rosewood tree. And yet, they reveal the trees are been logged and smuggled at an alarming rate. From the forests of Casamance, through the port of neighboring Gambia and all the way onto China.

For a year BBC Africa Eye with Umaru Fofana has been investigating the million-dollar trade in trafficked rosewood.

Click here to watch the report.

Salah Abu Ali has three children. But he has another son here, he says, pointing towards the gnarled trunk of the Al Badawi tree. Weathered and ancient, it looks more like an oak than an olive tree, with muscular stalks and a cavernous trunk. Sensing confusion, Ali walks to the tree. He kneels below the branches and gently caresses a small sapling that’s sprouted near the base. He says he found it on the day his last son was born.

In the sleepy Palestinian village of Al Walaja, on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Ali wakes every morning to tend to his family’s orchard. Entering through a neighbor’s yard, he trots down the grove’s narrow paths in a way that belies his age, occasionally reaching down to quickly toss aside trespassing stones; briskly descending verdant terraces, one after another until he comes to the edge of the orchard. It is at this edge where Ali spends most of his day, pumping water from the spring above or tending to the soil. It is where he sometimes sleeps at night, and where he hosts people that have made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But many come for the tree, an olive that some believe to be the oldest in the world.

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Every spring, the 3,800 cherry trees along Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin burst into a symphony of pink-and-white blossoms. Because this picturesque period lasts, on average, just four to seven days, the spectacle is a much-anticipated annual event, with local horticulturalists and cherry blossom enthusiasts alike predicting the timing of peak bloom ahead of the National Park Service’s (NPS) official announcement.

This year, reports the NPS, peak bloom—when more than 70 percent of Yoshino cherry trees, the most common species in the area, open their buds—is projected to begin between March 27 and 30.

The floral explosion and accompanying National Cherry Blossom Festival draw more than a million visitors to the city each year. The festival commemorates the cherry trees’ 1912 arrival in D.C.; Tokyo’s mayor, Yukio Ozaki, gifted 3,020 cherry blossoms to the capital as a symbol of friendship between the United States and Japan.

In honor of the peak bloom announcement, Smithsonian magazine has compiled a list of ten fun facts highlighted in Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections From the Library of Congress, a new offering from Smithsonian Books that invites readers to learn about the trees’ history through original artwork, artifacts and photographs.

The 1,200-year-old tradition has its roots in plum blossoms.

Beginning in the ninth century A.D., Japanese aristocrats often brought saplings and trees down from the mountains to grace their gardens. The practice was initially associated with plum blossoms, known as ume, but became linked almost exclusively with cherry blossoms during the Heian period (794 to 1185). Hanami flower-viewingcelebrations featuring food, drink, poetry and music continued through the Meiji era (1868 to 1912) to modern times. These gatherings later influenced Washington D.C.’s own cherry blossom traditions.

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The ginkgo is a living fossil. It is the oldest surviving tree species, having remained on the planet, relatively unchanged for some 200 million years. A single ginkgo may live for hundreds of years, maybe more than a thousand. They’ve survived some of our world’s greatest catastrophes, from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

So what’s the secret to their longevity?

In the rings and genes of Ginkgo biloba trees in China, some of which are confirmed to be more than 1,000 years old, scientists are starting to find answers.

“In humans, as we age, our immune system begins to start to not be so good,” said Richard Dixon, a biologist at the University of North Texas. But in a way, “the immune system in these trees, even though they’re 1,000 years old, looks like that of a 20-year-old.”

He and colleagues in China and the United States compared young and old ginkgo trees, ranging in age from 15 to 1,300 years old, in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. By examining the genetics of the vascular cambium, a layer or cylinder of living cells behind the bark, they found that the ginkgo grows wide indefinitely through old age.

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The James River Association website recently featured a piece by Deya Ramsden of the Virginia Department of Forestry on the secret life of forest soil in winter.

In February, the winter forest may not appear to be particularly active. However, below ground, the soil remains dynamic in temperate forests even when outdoor temperatures are chilly. In a mature forest, the soil is made up of a complex mix of tree roots and a community of fungus, microbes and good bacteria. The soil organisms are vital for breaking down organic matter so nutrients are available for uptake by the tree roots and to sustain the community itself.  The soil bed maintains at a fairly comfortable temperature year-round. Even if above grounds temperatures are below freezing, soil temperatures never drop below 30˚F. In addition, the deeper layers of soil maintain even higher temperatures.

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Two “priceless” bonsai trees have been returned to their rightful home at a Washington state museum after they were stolen last week.

The Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way, Washington, is home to more than 100 rare and ancient bonsai trees. On February 9th, museum staffers were left frantic with worry when they discovered that a pair of 70-year-old trees had been taken from the facility.

One of the trees, a Japanese Black Pine, was particularly notable for being grown out of a tin can by a Japanese-American man incarcerated in a World War II internment camp.

The museum quickly made a social media post begging for information on the trees’ whereabouts.

“This is a tremendous loss, not only to our collection but there is a strong likelihood that the trees will perish. These trees have been cared for every day for more than 70 years, and if that daily care doesn’t continue the trees will die,” wrote Aarin Packard, Pacific Bonsai Museum Curator.

The post was shared across the internet until—just 72 hours after their reported theft—museum security guards found the two stolen trees sitting on the roadside near the museum.

Although one of the trees had suffered from some minor broken branches, they were in surprisingly good condition following the heist.

They were put back on display later that very same day and museum staffers thanked members of the public for helping to bring the bonsais back home.

They announced that they now plan on installing an updated security system thanks to the sudden influx of online donations following the trees’ return.

Urban trees stand guard against storm damage, raise property values, boost wellbeing and even help other city systems like roads work more efficiently, according to urban forestry experts.

So, should city officials treat them as core infrastructure — as a utility themselves?

In the face of a warming planet and breakneck urbanization, a growing number of U.S. policymakers and citizens are asking that question.

“We’re having a moment in our field right now, a sudden awakening,” said Ian Leahy, vice president of urban forestry at American Forests, a non-profit.

Last week Republican lawmakers proposed legislation setting a goal for the United States to plant a trillion trees by 2050 to fight global warming.

U.S. cities alone could plant about 400,000 of those trees, noted the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank. And the benefits would go well beyond carbon storage.

According to the National Tree Benefit Calculator, which uses data from the U.S. Forest Service, a single 36-inch diameter (91-cm) willow oak in a residential area in the D.C. suburbs can provide nearly $330 in benefits per year.

Those include slowing stormwater runoff, cooling air temperatures, and even boosting student achievement and public health, Leahy explained.

Citing similar benefits, the United Nations food agency in September announced plans to plant up to 500,000 hectares of urban forests in 90 cities across Africa and Asia by 2030.

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Flourishing within one of India’s driest regions is Thimmamma Marrimanu, the world’s largest single tree canopy. The banyan tree was first added to the Guinness Book of World Records in 1989 (its entry updated in 2017) as being 550 years old and having the “greatest perimeter length for a tree”, spreading over five acres with a circumference of 846m.

The banyan (Ficus benghalensis), also called Indian banyan or banyan fig, is part of the mulberry family and is native to the Indian subcontinent. Stretching outward in every direction, it looks more like a grove or a forest than a single tree. Considered a “strangler” tree, it begins life as an epiphyte, a plant that grows on the surface of another plant, first by planting seeds in the branches of other trees and then by sprouting vine-like roots that block the host tree of sunlight as they wind down and eventually anchor themselves into the forest floor. These roots then spread underground, depriving all other nearby plants of water and nutrients, using these resources to then thicken into big pillars that look like tree trunks. The banyan will keep growing and expanding as far as its surroundings permit.

Thimmamma Marrimanu has more than 4,000 roots making up its canopy. It has been damaged by cyclones and droughts over the centuries, with large clumps of well-established roots having fallen sideways or broken off completely. But nevertheless, the tree is still expanding. The small collection of dusty mountains in which it is nestled provides a small, bowl-like clearing that allows for good drainage and sunlight with plenty of room for the tree to grow.

Click here to see more pictures of this incredible specimen…