Month: May 2022

“The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun. “ 

Napoleon Hill

From Public History PDX:

On March 21, 1910, a violent riot took place in the heart of St. Johns, during which two hundred local residents, including prominent members of the community, attacked the town’s East-Indian population. By the end of the day, the majority of the town’s East Indian population were forcibly placed on trains and sent south to Portland. The conditions of the riot were described by the St. John’s Review as follows: “The trouble had been brewing for some time on account of the number of Hindus consistently increasing at the St. Johns lumber mill. White men, it has been said, have been replaced by these Turbaned fellows, and a strong feeling of animosity toward them has engendered.” While the riot was often explained as a labor dispute, the St. Johns Review’s quip about “turbaned fellows” reveals racial prejudice that underlined the entire conflict.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

More than 40 years after the explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens, relics from the blast continue to haunt nearby Spirit Lake. The remains of thousands of trees that were violently stripped from the mountainside in 1980 still float on the lake in 2021. But the log mat is more than a reminder of the volcano’s destruction; scientists think it has become an important part of the lake’s ecosystem.

From House and Garden:

Magnolias are thermogenic and their blooms produce real cellular heat. This is thought to be a reward for pollinating beetles and an encouragement for them to linger. Our traditional garden magnolias, the ones foregrounding those Cookham paintings by Stanley Spencer, come from the forests of East Asia where spring can be cold and long. What a boon the candle of warmth must be for Zhejiang Province sap beetles, newly emerged in early March with snow still on the hills. Mrs Manstey herself could not appreciate the petals more.

From SciTech Daily:

“Until now, little has been known about the role of dead trees,” Professor Lindenmayer said.

“We know living trees play a vital role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But up until now, we didn’t know what happens when those trees decompose. It turns out, it has a massive impact.”

From Wired:

I reached a colossal tree, a rampart, her branches thick right to the ground and as big as trees themselves. Her large size and old age were magnificent compared to her neighbors. She looked like the mother of all Mother Trees. What foresters call a “wolf tree”—far older, bigger, and with a much wider crown than the others, a lone survivor of previous calamities. She had lived through centuries of ground fires that others had—at one time or another—succumbed to. I waded through squalls of seedlings to get to the fringe of her crown and picked up a cone perhaps clipped by a squirrel, its bracts dusted in white spores. Her life had started when the Secwepemc people cared for this land, long before the Europeans came, when the Native people regularly lit fires to create habitat for game, or to stimulate growth of valuable native plants, or to clear routes for trading with neighboring nations, and they’d kept the fuels low so the flames were never intense enough to have burned off her thick bark completely. I was sure if I cored her, her rings would be calloused with char every twenty years or so, like the stripes of a zebra. I was struck by her endurance, her rhythm that spanned centuries. It was a matter of survival, not a choice, not an indulgence. Light glanced off her bark, incandescent, the sun dropping.

Wolf Trees Previously: 1, 2

From Nikon Small World:

Infested Leaf
Victor Sykora

Honorable Mention
2007 Photomicrography Competition

From the Wausau Daily Herald:

In 1997, Larson came to Wisconsin on a research trip from his home in Ontario to look for old trees and take core samples. On that trip, he took a sample from a red cedar, in a part of Brown County called Greenleaf, that his lab estimated to be 1,290 years old.

That is a notable tree.

From Digital Photography Review:

But Insta-fame comes with consequences in this day and age. No matter how beautiful or inspiring, no matter how much joy something brings to the general populace, there will always be those people who get some deluded self-satisfaction out of destroying it.

This is what happened to The Broccoli Tree.

From Medium:

I began reading aloud, and, a third of the way in, the book ambushed me: I choked up, teetering on the verge of outright weeping. Certain phrases wrenched me inside. I could barely get through the book, needing to stop several times to gather myself (while pretending to admire the illustrations, of course). It was an intense, ineffable feeling: not quite sadness, certainly not joy, but not even nostalgia — something deeper.