If you could core this book the way you can take a tree core to count tree rings and growth patterns, it might be hard to see individual rings in this informationally dense book. It is certainly worth the read but I must apologize for thinking that we could read it for an in-depth discussion in a single month! I am still working my way through it – at a much more leisurely pace now – and feel like it is changing how I think about trees as living beings and about age. I am thinking also about the things we humans alive at this point in time will never see. There’s a quip I think I’ve heard to the effect that it takes 100 years to grow a hundred year old tree. Because we have cut through great swathes of hundred (plus) year old forests, we will never experience what it would have been like to walk through one. We certainly have some images and a number of stories and there are certainly residual elder trees and small forests, but I do wonder what it would have been like…
As is often the case, the author’s website is a great place to get to know both the person and how they see their work. It also tends to be a great place to find links to interesting articles, reviews, and interviews. Jared Farmer’s website is no exception.
I picked one of the zoom videos posted on the website: Ancient Trees in Modern Times (1 hr 32 min presentation). We listened to a few minutes from about 8-11 min for a general overview and 19:50-21:10 for an El Malpais tree, likely just about 30 minutes west of Albuquerque.
And another one: Monuments of Nature (1 hr 24 min). We watched from about 12-19 min on the dragon tree, and a clip beginning at about 28 min 39 sec on the Nazis.
In reading about the various trees, I picked bits and pieces of things that seemed interesting to me. In no particular order…
IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature.
A general search on “tree legal protection” turns up all sorts of interesting stuff. At the moment, a lot of the legal articles I found focus on trees as problems and who’s responsible when a tree falls on your roof, etc. However, there’s also a fair amount related to protecting particular trees or landscapes, often as historically important entities.
One thing I ran across elsewhere (and posted on the blog page) is: The tree that owns itself.
Monkey puzzle. I’ve read about monkey puzzles in novels – most notably in Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, in which a child in earlier years had ridden a cart down a hill: “Often she’d end up landing in the monkey puzzle, as a matter of fact.” I read the book many years ago but, having never known what a monkey puzzle was, it has stuck in my mind. And then, in one of those more or less useless but satisfying synchronicities, I came across it again a few days ago and learned that the name came from a chance remark that it would puzzle a monkey to figure out how to climb that tree.
Peruvian actor marries a tree. We watched something similar when reading another book but I thought this clip provided a bit more context. The other one presented the man as a bit of an eccentric but here he explains that he wants people to take trees more seriously.
Introduction to dendrochronology: (very basic) but there are other video clips in the series about plants… like this one. Core principles and concepts of dendrochronology.
Dr. Tom Swetnam is an expert in putting together chronologies using tree ring data to understand fire in the southwest. His website is here. He lives, I believe, in Jemez Springs now, and was a speaker at the recent Think Trees conference. It was a delight to get to listen to him in person.
I forget when I first found this website but it has such interesting information about large, old trees.
This is another topic we’ve discussed in relation to yew trees: trees changing sex.
I regret to say that I forgot to show this clip about the ginkgo that survived the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This video shows images from the 1945 bombing.
Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH) harvests seeds from the surviving trees (apparently there were 62 in all – not only ginkgos) and sends them around the world as a peace message, green legacy, and a symbol of hope. One of their partners, aka recipients of seeds, is the Los Alamos History Museum. In a June 2017 posting on the GLH website they describe “camphor, ginkgo, Kurogane holly, and persimmon seeds from GLH and The Hiroshima Botanical Garden [being sent to Los Alamos]. So far the ginkgo and persimmon seeds have germinated. With help from staff gardeners and the Los Alamos County Parks Department, the museum will be cultivating these historic trees for future planting on the museum grounds.” A map page lets you click at locations around the world with these seeds. The Los Alamos History Museum has a brief post and photograph of growing ginkgo seedlings from 2019 but I could find nothing since then…
In a total lapse of memory and notes, I have forgotten what exactly we were talking about but I think it was a tree in Australia being grown as a bonsai and Lynn’s brother-in-law was growing them in his garage there. If I’ve totally garbled this, please let me know! But what I do remember was how cool it was to have an almost personal connection to the trees in the book.