Month: June 2019

The burly woodsman who attacks the diminutive pine of the east must experience remorse, as would a strong man who made war upon a boy, but [the Redwood] is something to compel his respect; he must feel that in grappling with these monsters he is doing the work of a Hercules.

Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History

From Explore Churches:

As ancient as they are beautiful, our churches are the present custodians of yew trees planted and cared for over many centuries. From 500 year old trees planted in the Middle Ages, 800 year old trees planted by the Normans, even older specimens planted by Saxons and early Welsh saints and the possibility that some might even predate Christianity.

From the Paris Review:

The long-lived European yew tree—Taxus baccata, the tree of the dead, the tree of poisonous seeds—bears witness to the antiquity of the churchyard and shades its “rugged elms,” and the mounds and furrows of its graves: The yew of legend is old and lays claim to immemorial presence. We are speaking here of two or three dozen exemplary giants, some with a circumference of ten meters, that have stood for between 1,300 and 3,000 years but also of many more modest and historically documented trees that have lived, and been memorialized, for centuries. At least 250 yews today are as old or older than the churchyards in which they stand. Some were there when the first Saxon and indeed the first British Christian wattle churches were built; a seventh-century charter from Peronne in Picardy speaks of preserving the yew on the site of a new church. 

excerpt from The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Thomas Laqueur

From The New York Times:

The fight to protect the rosewood tree — whose slow growth makes its wood both rare and precious — extends across much of Southeast Asia, where Vietnam and Cambodia are known as logging hubs, and where Laos just last year legislated its first formal logging limitations.

Thailand is the only country in the region with significant stands of rosewood remaining. In the past three months, it has seen a sudden spike in cross-border tree poaching, Mr. Redford said.

For more than 1,000 years, the region’s fragrant rosewood was used to make furniture for China’s elite. Since 2010, though, Chinese demand for Thai wood has ramped up. The wood has become highly fashionable for making ornamental furniture — a throwback to the imperial dynasties — and is a status symbol among China’s newly rich.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

The fires have sprung up in a time that ecologists refer to as the “spring dip.” Scientists have noted for years that forests in Canada and around the Great Lakes in the United States are especially susceptible to fire in the late spring because trees and grasses reach a point of extremely low moisture content (a dip) between the end of winter and the start of new seasonal growth. The effect is not yet well understood, as it also involves subtle changes in plant chemistry.

From Gizmodo:

Religious scholars have long debated where Noah constructed his floating zoo made of “gopher wood” (Genesis 6:14) and what tree the ark’s gopher wood even came from. Some residents in the Florida Panhandle have an unlikely answer. The place in question is, well, there, and the tree in question is torreya taxifolia. Known locally as gopher wood (or, less Biblically, as stinking cedar for the astringent smell it releases when needles and stems are rolled between the fingers), local legend has it that the tree with its supple yellow wood was used to build the ark that Noah rode out 40 days of floods on, with the menagerie landing, eventually, on Mount Ararat in Turkey.

• Title: Loading logs onto truck. Shawano County, Wisconsin
• Date Created/Published: July 1941
• Medium: 1 photographic print.

From The Daily Overview:

From the Long Now Foundation:

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

From Wikipedia:

The Janzen–Connell hypothesis is a widely accepted explanation for the maintenance of tree species biodiversity in tropical rainforests…According to their hypothesis, host-specific herbivores, pathogens, or other natural enemies make the areas near a parent tree inhospitable for the survival of seedlings…Such predators can prevent any one species from dominating the landscape, because if that species is too common, there will be few safe places for its seedlings to survive…As a result, if a species becomes very rare, then more predator-free areas will become available, giving that species’ seedlings a competitive advantage. This negative feedback allows the tree species to coexist, and can be classified as a stabilizing mechanism.

From Nikon Small World:

Acrostichum aureum, mangrove fern (TS leaf midrib)
Daphne Zbaeren-Colbourn

2008 Photomicrography Competition
Honorable Mention