February 06, 2005

• Nice link BlueHorse :) I don't want to derail this thread if it's mainly about Aspens, but there are some other candidates for oldest tree/clones in Australia. From this page: The Huon Pine (a stand at least 10,500 years old). "Two specimens of the world's rarest eucalypt, the Mongarlowe Mallee (Eucalyptus recurva), which grow 40 metres apart, may be part of the same original tree. If so, they are estimated to be 13,000 years old! If not, the individuals themselves may be 3,000 years old, making them Australia's oldest trees." Possibly the world's oldest plant (if you don't count Pando!), "King's Holly (Lomatia tasmanica), with a clonal colony possibly up to 43,000 years old".
• Heh. I spread.
• This reminds me of when I was trying to dig up some saplings from the wild for my garden. I don't even know what type it was but those roots went forever back to the main grove. A very frustrating learning experience.
• These links took me on a long journey into the plant kingdom. Grand FPP, BlueHiorse!
• link to amazon.com for an excellent book about trees in britain and ireland. meetings with remarkable trees is also a bbc documentary. pakenham, the book's author, has more recently published remarkable trees of the world. i suppose there's some irony in producing expensive books about trees.
• Thanks for the lovely links, BlueHorse. I'm cuckoo for catalpas.
• I'm rather fond of the Arbutus tree.
• Islander, is it for the scent?
• Meanwhile, the largest organism in the world is a 2200 acre fungus in Oregon, the delicious Honey Mushroom.
• Bluehorse, although the flowers have a wonderful scent, it's more the appearance. The deep red-orange colour of the bark and the gnarled growth patterns of the limbs are really striking against the Arbutus's usual backdrop of an evergreen forest. This is particularly dramatic seen from the water when the sun is low in the sky, near sunrise or sunset. I'll see if I can find a picture to show you what I mean.
• Sounds lovely, Islander. Not only is there a fungus amongus, but it's an oldster! Shinything, imitation is the sincerest form.... Roryk, I love fantastic tree on the cover of Trees of the World Irony is right--I can just picture both of these as coffee table books on a Brazilian hardwood table.
• This and this are kinda what I meant, GramMa.
• islander, Arbutus reminds me of Manzanita from Southern California,which has beautiful smooth, burnished, glowing, orange-red translucent bark. It's one of my favorites. I hope I get a chance to see Arbutus as well. Strangely, in the East, neither Arbutus nor Manzanita can be found as trees but as wildflowers, Trailing Arbutus, a small uncommon woodland plant with intensely fragrant white flowers, and Bearberry, a trailing ground cover from beaches and sandy areas, respectively.
• 9 When one has lived a long time alone, and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer, and the bullfrog head half out of the water utters the cantillations he sang in his first spring, and the snake lowers himself over the threshold and slides away among the stones, one sees they all have to mate with their kind, and one knows, after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken away from one's kind, toward those other kingdoms, the hard prayer inside one's own singing is to come back, if one can, to one's own, a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens, when one has lived a long time alone. -- Galway Kinnell, from "When one has lived a long time alone"
• Even minnows under the bridge won't sleep alone -- one head upstream one head downstream. -- from Kanginshu
• when fish weep who can tell?
• only other fish will know.
• slide through deep water salt as human tears fish mute to utter fish-dreamt hopes and fears
• )))
• how did I miss a GramMa FPP?? - nice one! The Larch. The. Larch. Reginald Maulding's . . . elbow.
• a new quilt covers the mountains -- maples turn to flame
• I like the willow tree. There used to be one in the front yard and its drooping branches would get so that we couldn't open the car door without them slipping inside the car. I think that tree wanted to go places.
• Over my driveway, at the turnaround by the house, is a walnut tree which gives off a lot of fine droplets of tree spit when it's in leaf. Covers any vehicles below with this. Ravens like to come and perch in that particlar tree because they can watch us put out compost from the house and food for ravens on the other side of the drive. The raven-watch cries for the others, who come flying across the valley to land and feed. And these ravens splat. Down the driver-side door of my truck, and on the windshield. (For some reason, the other fools of my household don't like to park there, so that space gets left for my truck, which is getting old and battered but is still functional.) Heh. Ingrate birds see to it I alway get to park closest to the house. ;]
• lemon tree very pretty/ and the lemon flower is sweet/ but the fruit of the poor lemon/ is impossible to eat
• Eucalyptus. I know they're not California-native, and I'm supposed to dislike them for having overrun native plants, but I used to live near a hillside grove of them (north face of Twin Peaks, above Cole Valley), and when the wind was right I'd drift off to sleep with their scent filling my bedroom (I slept with the window open then, which my girlfriend doesn't let me do now, which is something I'm realizing as I write this that I resent).
• Staghorn sumac is one of my favourites. It's a short native tree, one of the few around here that looks vaguely tropical (to me). In the fall, its red leaves rival red maples. It's considered a weed by many, but I planted one in my yard to supervise the plantain, chickweed, clover and chamomile insurrection.
• My tree is the guayacán (guaiacum officinalis) or Lignum Vitae. Heavy, gorgeous, scarce, noble. It has been overharvested, almost extinct by now. You see one of those trees, and you can not but wonder about your own role in the world.
• I too loved willow trees guava (we called them "weeping willows"). As a child, I was especially fond of Paper Birch trees (I did not know what they were called at the time). Our backyard had many (guessing around 20) arranged around a square-shaped garden. They were slim and tall, just right for climbing! But what I really loved was peeling off sheets of the bark and imagining that I was going to write a book. I think I scribbled some make-believe battle plans instead. I too missed this fine GranMa FPP! Cheers bees for poking through the oldies and bringing out the goodies!
• What It Is It is madness says reason It is what it is says love It is unhappiness says caution It is nothing but pain says fear It has no future says insight It is what it is says love It is ridiculous says pride It is foolish says caution It is impossible says experience It is what it is says love -- Erich Fried
• The White Pine, growing through a rocky outcrop of Canadian Shield granite, as captured by A.J. Casson. This is the image that draws me and my canoe to Northern Ontario rivers every summer.
• Some non-Canadians may not be familiar with Casson's name -- he was the last-surviving member of the Canadian Group of Painters. Originally known as the Group of Seven, they were primarily landscape painters whose Post-Impressionist works helped to shape a visual Canadian identity.
• Caring is loving, motionless, An interval of more and less Between the stress and the distress. After the present falls the past, After the festival, the fast, Always the deepest is the last. This is the circle we must trace, Not spiralled outward, but a space Returning to its starting place. Centre of all we mourn and bless, Centre of calm beyond excess, Who cares for caring, has caress. -- F(rank) R(eginald) Scott, "Caring"
• mmmGuess.
• *succumbs* Well...my faceorite = poet-tree.
• Curses! favorite favorite favorite!
• Are you related to our own H. Wingo, by any chance, crataegus?
• Thread Suns Thread suns about the grey black wilderness. A tree- high thought tunes in to light's pitch: there are still songs to be sung on the other side of mankind. -- Paul Celan, trans Michael Hamburger
• If I become a stone some would become lotus lotus, lake and if I become a lake lake would become lotus lotus, stone. -- So Chong-ju, "If I Became a Stone", trans David R. McCann
• Thanks to cherry blossom in its shadow utter strangers -- there are none! -- Issa, trans Harold E. Henderson
• Speaking of Trees Greg Williamson For the tree of the field is man's life. Deuteronomy 20:19 I'm here with some sugar maples, speaking of trees, And they're not saying much. In spite of all The rumors of persistent whispering, They do not mention genealogies, Wisdom with all its branches nor the Fall, As if they wouldn't stand for anything. We've made them our field representatives, Rooted in history but branching out, Replete with trunks, limbs, crowns and sappy hearts, Sowing their seeds in time, shedding their leaves In the very autumn Shakespeare writes about, As if they were our natural counterparts. They simply do not care, nor break their silence On our blossoming conceit. And while I hug Myself against the cool and breezy plain As the brow of a storm is darkening with violence, Look how the sugar maples seem to shrug, Turning their palmate leaves to catch the rain.
• She had no saying dark enough For the dark pine which kept Forever trying the window-latch Of the room where they slept; The tireless but ineffectual hands That, with every futile pass, Made the great tree seem as a little bird Before the mystery of glass. The tree had never been inside the room, And only one of the two Was afraid, in an oft-repeated dream, Of what the tree might do. --Robert Frost, "The Oft-Repeated Dream"
• wind claps the palms together stripped of their leaves they bow they bend low and yet they weather all but the worst blows
• palms = palms = groovy.
• not groovy--palmate
• Palm ate what?
• Jane Hirshfield Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books— Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
• The Tree House Have you seen our mulberry tree And the neighborhood children With purple lips and blue fingers Climbing to the house in its branches? -- May Miller
• Wind and Tree In the way that the most of the wind Happens where there are trees, Most of the world Is centred about ourselves. Often where the wind has gathered The trees together, One tree will take Another in her arms and hold. Their branches that are grinding Madly together, It is no real fire. They are breaking each other. Often I think I should be like The single tree, going nowhere, Since my own arm could not and would not Break the other. Yet by my broken bones I tell new weather. -- Paul Muldoon
• Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books -- Already the first branch tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. -- Jane Hirshfield
• The Tree by Ezra Pound I stood still and was a tree amid the wood, Knowing the truth of things unseen before; Of Daphne and the laurel bow And that god-feasting couple old that grew elm-oak amid the wold. 'Twas not until the gods had been Kindly entreated, and been brought within Unto the hearth of their heart's home That they might do this wonder thing; Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before.
• Well, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there And, as you might say, saw the lady born. Paul worked at anything in lumbering. He'd been bard at it taking boards away For--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer To want to find out if he couldn't pile The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy. They'd sliced the first slab off a big butt log, And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back To slam end-on again against the saw teeth. To judge them by the way they caught themselves When they saw what had happened to the log, They must have had a guilty expectation Something was going to go with their slambanging. Something bad left a broad black streak of grease On the new wood the whole length of the log Except, perhaps, a foot at either end. But when Paul put his finger in the grease, It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot. The log was hollow. They were sawing pine. "First time I ever saw a hollow pine. That comes of having Paul around the place. Take it to bell for me," the sawyer said. Everyone had to have a look at it And tell Paul what he ought to do about it. (They treated it as his.) "You take a jackknife, And spread the opening, and you've got a dugout All dug to go a-fishing in." To Paul The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees. There was no entrance for them to get in by. It looked to him like some new kind of hollow He thought he'd better take his jackknife to. So after work that evening be came back And let enough light into it by cutting To see if it was empty. He made out in there A slender length of pith, or was it pith? It might have been the skin a snake had cast And left stood up on end inside the tree The hundred years the tree must have been growing. More cutting and he bad this in both hands, And looking from it to the pond nearby, Paul wondered how it would respond to water. Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air He made in walking slowly to the beach Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it. He laid it at the edge, where it could drink. At the first drink it rustled and grew limp. At the next drink it grew invisible. Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers, And thought it must have melted. It was gone. And then beyond the open water, dim with midges, Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom, It slowly rose a person, rose a girl, Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet, Who, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul. And that made Paul in turn look back To see if it was anyone behind him That she was looking at instead of him. (Murphy had been there watching all the time, But from a shed where neither of them could see him.) There was a moment of suspense in birth When the girl seemed too waterlogged to live, Before she caught her first breath with a gasp And laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet, And walked off, talking to herself or Paul, Across the logs like backs of alligators, Paul taking after her around the pond. -Robert Frost
• Binsey Poplars FELLED 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All are felled, felled, all are felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew -- Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, When we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. -- Gerard Manley Hopkins
• A Dream of Trees ––Mary Oliver There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees, A quiet house, some green and modest acres A little way from every troubling town, A little way from factories, schools, laments. I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, With only streams and birds for company, To build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me, that so was death, A little way away from everywhere. There is a thing in me still dreams of trees. But let it go. Homesick for moderation, Half the world's artists shrink or fall away. If any find solution, let him tell it. Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation Where, as the times implore our true involvement, The blades of every crisis point the way. I would it were not so, but so it is. Who ever made music of a mild day?
• The Filbert Orchard They were like old soldiers, limbs grizzled with lichen, the way they staggered in rows down the hill. In spring they sprouted sparse flags, waved them foolishly at the jays. Moles at their feet carved generations of mansions. Rotted and aging in place, they were those old fathers we never had. A company of lost men. In the backyard at night, bare feet on the braille of root and stone, I heard them. Brittle shiftings, faint sounds like cries, calls in the dark like at Vicksberg: "Any of you boys from Missouri? Seen my father? my brother?" There is snow on the distant ridge. Sky blanketing down. All that light! The memory of branches. -- Diane Williams Stepp
• The Flame Tree Blooms It was you planted it; and it grew high and put on crops of leaves, extravagant fans; sheltered in it the spider weaves and birds move through it. Foa all it grew so well it never bloomed, though we watched patiently, having chosen its place where we could see it from our windowsill. Now, in its eighteenth spring, suddenly, wholly, ceremoniously it puts off every leaf and stands up nakedly, calling and gathering every capacity in it, every power, drawing up from the very roots of being this pulse of total red that shocks my seeing into an agony of flower. It was you planted it; and I lean on the sill to see it stand in its dry shuffle of leaves, just as we planned, these past years feeding it. -- Judith Wright
• Polly's Tree A dream tree, Polly's tree; a thicket of sticks, each speckled twig ending in a thin-paned leaf unlike unlike any other on it or in a ghost flower flat as paper and of a color vaporish as frost-breath, more finical than any silk fan the Chinese ladies use to stir robin's egg air. The silver- haired seed of the milkweed comes to roost there, frail as the halo rayed round a candle flame, a willo'-the-wisp nimbus, or puff of cloud-stuff, tipping her queer candalabrum. Palely lit by snuff-ruffed dandelions, white daisy wheels and a tiger faced pansy, it glows. O it's no family tree, Polly's tree, nor a tree of heaven, though it marry quartz-flake, feather and rose. It sprang from her pillow whole as a cobweb ribbed like a hand, a dream tree. Polly's tree wears a valentine arc of tear-pearled bleeding hearts on its sleeve and, crowning it, one blue larkspur star. -- Sylvia Plath
• All life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of existence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Death: its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-Kingdom, sit the three Fates - the Past, Present and Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. It's "bough," with their buddings and disleafings, - events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes, - stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fiber there an act or word? Its boughs are the Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. .... I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. - Thomas Carlyle Igdrasil or Yggdrasil Its branches extend over all the known worlds, and its roots extend into three of them. It's the name of Odin's Horse, referring to the time he "rode" upon the tree and learned the runes. It is also at times referred to as Hoddmimir, Tree of Mimir, and Lærád or Lerad. It is usually called an Ash tree. Tree of Fate Another site for the world tree
• Thought Sleipnir was the name of Odin's horse.
• Ibiza's Monster Marine Plant
• They put oxygen in the air, in the ground, and now it seems they clean water -- wonderful plants! Why, if these revelations keep up, I shall turn into a Weed and a Wet like yon Fotherington-Thomas: Hello, sky! Hello, trees! Hello, clouds!
• Bees: Yes, I'd heard of Sleipnir, but Yggdrasil has also been called Odin's horse. From: Encyclopedia Mythica™ In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil ("The Terrible One's Horse"), also called the World Tree, is the giant ash tree that links and shelters all the worlds. Beneath the three roots the realms of Asgard, Jotunheim, and Niflheim are located. Three wells lie at its base: the Well of Wisdom (Mímisbrunnr), guarded by Mimir; the Well of Fate (Urdarbrunnr), guarded by the Norns; and the Hvergelmir (Roaring Kettle), the source of many rivers. Four deer run across the branches of the tree and eat the buds; they represent the four winds. There are other inhabitants of the tree, such as the squirrel Ratatosk ("swift teeth"), a notorious gossip, and Vidofnir ("tree snake"), the golden cock that perches on the topmost bough. The roots are gnawed upon by Nidhogg and other serpents. On the day of Ragnarok, the fire giant Surt will set the tree on fire. Other names for the tree include: Ask Yggdrasil, Hoddmimir's Wood, Laerad and Odin's Horse.
• BlueHorse, I think you're both right: "Odin's Horse" is probably a kenning for the World Tree or for ash trees in general, just as "Sif's hair" was for gold or "Baldur's bane" for mistletoe. My favourite tree grows in the far corner of New College Gardens in Oxford. It's a London plane, and if you lean against the trunk and look up into its branches, you get dizzy. I concluded from this that it was a magic tree, and spent many hours talking to it.
• Thanks, BlueHorse, I learn something new every day. I like the kenning/epithet idea, Pallas Athena, very helpful, too. Now I want a magic tree!
• Lovely link, Pallas! I'd never explored the Wiki info on kennnings, and it's one of the easiest to understand explaination of kenning use I've read. I have a magic tree that stands all by itself in a little draw way out in the desert. It's magic because it's at least 30 feet tall, and there's no other trees for at least 10 miles around it. And there's no obvious source of water--that's what's amazing. Just one tough tree growing out of the rocks.
• I know a maple tree that tosses boomerangs of seed so they whirl as they dodge my grasping hands its shade is thick and cooler than the ice melting on the glass bottles of cream the milkman leaves on the front porches below the maple stands a chestnut horse wearing a burlap nosebag as it eats lunch and I sit on the top step admiring the way the horse shudders its muscles, moving the maple's seed cases off its broad back
• )))! I think that's my second favourite, after Darjeeling, bees.
• Ooooh, Bees!
• If you guys promise to keep posting in the tree thread, I'll turn over a new leaf.
• I'm rooting for you, GramMa!
• *GramMa reads Tick's post, staggers, grasps chest, falls onto chair, barks knee Oh, the pain! The pain. My arms feel wooden, and my trunk aches. I think I'm having a pun-attack.
• Poor GramMa- you must be bushed! Lumber on over here - maybe you've got shingles, or perhaps a-corn? I'm jes' axing 'cause you're so poplar.
• That's really going out on a limb.
• This is the sappiest thread ever. Cypress the urge to pun, willow you?
• this thread is so larch that anyone who redwood be here all night.
• only a son of a beech would disagree
• Oh bees... I was ailing already, and you made me sycamore.
• I'll spray that you knot be berry ill, Pallas Athena; but never fir, I'll stick a rowan till the doctor gets here.
• Should you leaf, I would pine, for my heart would be bracken.
• Fiends maple me in half before I wood desert yew. You have no oaken bones, I trust?
• Enough! Enough! I'm aspen you to stop already!
• The way a crow Shook down on me A dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart a change of mood and saved some part of a day I had rued.
• ravens are a glossy black they cannot sing a note they chase the hawks and owls away on ravenkind they dote
• I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
• most excellent. Thanks Pallas
• Luverly!
• I don't think I can teak anymore of these puns n poems!
• Oak-ay, oak-ay. We'll stop, since you ash-ked so nicely.
• never a willow!
• Trees I am looking at trees they may be one of the things I will miss most from the earth though many of the ones I have seen already I cannot remember and though I seldom embrace the ones I see and have never been able to speak with one I listen to them tenderly their names have never touched them they have stood round my sleep and when it was forbidden to climb them they have carried me in their branches. -- W.S. Merwin
• I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. - Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862 God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!" - Joseph Campbell Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. - Kahlil Gibran
• Window I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree transclucent in brightness. And when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit stood there. Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened in my sleep. Czeslaw Milosz
• Fall Trees and the white room filling with the resistance to trees. Window windowing. Bringing I am over there with you on the couch in its sadness of arms. Resist the nature of being inside when outside is nature. Trees and the white room going about unknowing the sun. Casts a shadow of burning on the other side of night is unsided. In the eye of the field would I be seen if I had not the mark of my body slept there? Clouds touched over me and I awoke to trees just then stopping in their green the beginning of brown. A sigh not exactly among them but close to that "ah well it is time now to die" sound. Or a click, some days before leaves fall, each stem openning its valise and putting out its best dress for the fires. Soon orange trees and the white room singed. I could on a pyre be such brief smoke. My ashes one more subtraction for the wind. -- Bob Hicock
• Willow And I grew up in patterned tranquility, In the cool nursery of the young century. And the voice of man was not dear to me, But the voice of the wind I could understand. But best of all the silver willow. And obligingly, it lived With me all my life; its weeping branches Fanned my insomnia with dreams. And strange! -- I outlived it. There the stump stands; with strange voices Other willows are conversing Under our, under those skies. And I am silent. As if a brother had died. -- Anna Akhmatova
• THE GIVING TREE Once there was a giving tree who loved a little boy. And everyday the boy would come to play Swinging from the branches, sleeping in the shade Laughing all the summer’s hours away. And so they love, Oh, the tree was happy. Oh, the tree was glad. But soon the boy grew older and one day he came and said, "Can you give me some money, tree, to buy something I’ve found?" "I have no money," said the tree, "Just apples, twigs and leaves." "But you can take my apples, boy, and sell them in the town." And so he did and Oh, the tree was happy. Oh, the tree was glad. But soon again the boy came back and he said to the tree, "I’m now a man and I must have a house that’s all my home." "I can’t give you a house" he said, "The forest is my house." "But you may cut my branches off and build yourself a home" And so he did. Oh, the tree was happy. Oh, the tree was glad. And time went by and the boy came back with sadness in his eyes. "My life has turned so cold," he says, "and I need sunny days." "I’ve nothing but my trunk," he says, "But you can cut it down And build yourself a boat and sail away." And so he did and Oh, the tree was happy. Oh, the tree was glad. And after years the boy came back, both of them were old. "I really cannot help you if you ask for another gift." "I’m nothing but an old stump now. I’m sorry but I’ve nothing more to give" "I do not need very much now, just a quiet place to rest," The boy, he whispered, with a weary smile. "Well", said the tree, "An old stump is still good for that." "Come, boy", he said, "Sit down, sit down and rest a while." And so he did and Oh, the trees was happy. Oh, the tree was glad. —Shel Silverstein
• Merry... No one's hangin' stockin's up, No one's bakin' pie, No one's lookin' up to see A new star in the sky. No one's talkin' brotherhood, No one's givin' gifts, And no one loves a Christmas tree On March the twenty- fifth. —Shel Silverstein
• Aunt Leaf Needing one, I invented her -- the great-great-aunt dark as hickory called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud or The-Beauty-of-the-Night. Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves, and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool, and whisper in a language only the two of us knew the word that meant follow, and we'd travel cheerful as birds out of the dusty town and into the trees where she would change us both into something quicker -- two foxes with black feet, two snakes green as ribbons, two shimmering fish -- and all day we'd travel. At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door with the rest of my family, who were kind, but solid as wood and rarely wandered. While she, old twist of feathers and birch bark, would walk in circles wide as rain and then float back scattering the rags of twilight on fluttering moth wings; or she'd slouch from the barn like a grey opossum; or she'd hang in the milky moonlight burning like a medallion, this bone dream, this friend I had to have, this old woman made out of leaves. -- Mary Oliver
• Eureka! New tallest living thing discovered - THE CHAMPION: At 378.1 feet, Hyperion in Redwood National Park on North Coast towers 8 feet above Stratosphere Giant
• *tilts head back till she falls over Yeah!!!!
• Sky of Sleep Sometimes she is a tree in the sky of my sleep, with long branches to snag the string or the body of me. Sometimes I am a kite. Held there on a hundred windy days of summer, my edges tear from the desire to float away. birds pick at the string (useful in the construction of nests), the crucifixion of bones against blue sleep, and somewhere, in a waking dream, I make the necessary noises like snoring to scare them off. It is enough to be here in her arms, secure from drifting, drifting away. J.P. Dancing Bear
• The Bird Tree Come the blue dusk they are a chattering city above you. In the branches of a spruce, their shrill cries like thin strips of tin, chaffing, metal on metal, wordless and ancient. Your arms, which were once fins, twitch at the sight of them. But, you are a man; to rise would mean hanging from a tree for a while. And the dying part. This is happening. Every day your hands are sore, and seem to glow with an x-ray's fluorescence, flinching now even at the turning of doorknobs. You watch the god-step in their hop limb to limb, and name after name you could give them and not understand that purple and green iridescence glossed over their black, enviable bodies, the brilliant yellow of their eyes, black, too, at the centers, and shining. Moon like a zeppelin, bright between the leaves, drifts east towards a bank of storm clouds. Excited, the birds weave thin ropes of air around the mast of the tree, spindled and backlit by herds of standing stars. You approach and the rushing black surf lifts away. the rain, heavy as blood, comes down into the small spoons of your hands. -- D. James Smith
• I got a card today. When I opened it, a pair of leaves, long with curved bubble edges, drifted out. My big brother had been walking through a reservoir with his boyfriend, saw some oak trees and thought of me. (We had been hunting for oak trees my last trip there) It was a relatively sucky day, way too busy, but that was enough to make it worth waking up this morning (^_^)
• TRAVEL PLANS Leslie Monsour The pepper tree spilled round us from its source, and took a lumpish this-way, that-way course, while dangling hopeful sprays of cinnabar. You couldn't rest against the grizzled trunk; its bulby hump, its knurled and craggy scar, forced you to lean your weight on me instead. The two of us were just a little drunk, and sipped the sun-warmed wine to make us bold. "I'd like to go to Mexico," you said, "with you, someday, before we're too damn old," while in the sky an airplane's vapor trail politely licked its seal across the sun. We watched the growing, tantalizing tail, until it matter-of-factly came undone.
• Blue Willow A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate we traced its shallow rim my mother steering my inner tube past the rushes where I looked for Moses we said it was a trip around the world in China we wove through curtains of willow that tickled our necks let's do that again and we'd double back idle there lifting our heads to the green rain swallows over us later I dreamed of flying with them we had all the time in the world we had the world how could those trees be weeping? -- Jody Gladding
• Trees Jennifer Tseng One summer he planted a tree. It was young, small as a rose bush. We were intent on watching it. We were young, we wanted the fruit to come. Father brought the coffee can outside, paced between the tree and the backyard spigot. We liked to watch him fill the can, feed water to the little tree. We liked to see the brown soil blacken beneath his fingers. Young trees keep their fruit inside for so long. You have to stay with them for years before they'll bear it. When the first pear came we forgot about the water, the soil and the man with the coffee can. We could already taste its sweetness through the hard, green skin. It hung there new, like so many curves we recognized. Don't touch he said don't touch. We listened at first, we obeyed because it was small then easier to resist. But later we saw its size would fill up our hands. At night when he went away we held it. Finally the yellow ink took over, the flesh was soft, we became gentle. Father decided it was time to pluck it, he decided it was time to eat. Mother brought out the special plate, the red one mottled with Chinese birds. He placed the yellow pear on the red plate, divided the fruit with a knife. It lay there open like a flower, a pale tropical thing with four petals, keen with the smell of sugar. Each one dripping juice, almost tears, each one riven from the others, so yellow against the red birds. Choose one, he said. And we knew he would watch to see which one we chose. The old story echoed in the air, he did not have to speak to tell it. The story of the child with the most honor the one who saves the best for her mother. All of us fight for the smallest piece. Soon the fruit is gone, eaten under his watchful eye. Time to wait for the next one. Mother rinses the plate, shines the birds with her swift cloth. Now he has cut the tree down. He says it interferes with the plumbing. Too many roots. Mother is a bird flying. Sister sends me fruit in the mail: apricots, cranberries, apples, plums. We are young, small, hungry as girls, hiding our fruit in the cupboards
• Forest land road rule overturned
• Out west, aspens are dying at a phenomenal rate.
• *weeps for the aspens
• Tit for Tat I often pass a gracious tree Whose name I can't identify, But still I bow, in courtesy It waves a bough, in kind reply. I do not know your name, o tree (Are you a hemlock of a pine?) But why should that embarrass me? Quite probably you don't know mine. -- Christopher Morley
• of = or a pine
• Wind Ted Hughes This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye. At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as The coal-house door. Once I looked up -- Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope, The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap; The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought, Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on, Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
• The Wooden Library
• wherein we may see the leaves and seeds and lichen proper to each tree
• The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die, too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. -- Philip Larkin
• Willow Okay, willow, breathe on me from the sunless opening in you — crescent of gouges and breezes — slope on which beetles stumble and are flushed out — Traffic, human traffic with its rinse of promises and pauses is coming for keeps. And look there goes a swallow transplanting soil. Me (let me think it) I can sit on this bench longer than nature and not know or crave a thing about this bench, bottle cap dented into its plank and initials scratched beside it, beside the point: two raw letters forward to back just as rare as any combination. And now the date, plume of digits, daily statistic. This is behavior, willow, this drone, it accompanied you once in your grove of which you have a memory — a lush one — don't you? Was there no breath of you there? I crossed the arc of your silhouette and lapped your leaves' signature. Things grew from you beneath you in the patched grass and not far away sat a man on a bench. You take it in or you don't. You hide the sky or else. Things lived in you. You, stranger. -- Mark Levine
• *Bows to Bees, waves willow branches
• Eucalyptus for tree-lovers.
• oooooh! Eucalyptus (though they have a tendency to kill the vegetation under them) are some lovely trees. The best thing about them is the scent of their leaves rubbed between the fingers. Burning one or two dead eucalyptus leaves will perfume my whole apartment. Red gum trees are also lovely. Their bark is very smooth, making them very rewarding trees to hug.
• (though they have a tendency to kill the vegetation under them) They tend to lose big branches in the hot weather, too. Not the only thing they kill under them.
• This is why you must hug them. Stay on their good side!
• Pallas: I'm jealous. Wish I had some 'calyptus leaves to burn. *waiting impatiently for first spring green to show on trees
• where walnut trees drop leaves no other shrub inweaves and better yet the nipping fleas will know no ease and won't beget
• The Queen of Trees
• That was one of the best episodes of Nature I've seen in awhile.
• Was good, fershure. I thought about posting the linky, but am suffering from lazypostitis. Good on you, homy! OLDLIST Old trees
• old trees ent-sure the shade the air the ferns that every nurse log wears
• If you like that tree so much, why don't you just marry it?
• Geologists discover world's largest fossil forest in the ceiling of an Illinois coal mine
• That was the bestest story I've read all week! Thank you H-doggsei!
• Picture, more news yow!
• Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees
• World's tallest in arboreal witness protection
• The whole damn environment ought to be in a witness protection program to save it from our rapacious fearless leader.
• Good read! Thanks for posting, h-dogg. ...redwood forests are palpably spiritual places, even for atheists like me.
• A previous resident planted a redwood sapling six feet off the back left corner of my cabin. I imagine it seemed like a good idea at the time...
• If I could have a redwood, I would sacrifice the corner of the cabin!
• Do we really need their GM trees? The 'real' trees keep marching on. Trees for ethanol? Who's handing out the money for this stupid idea?
• What's Killing the Aspen? The signature tree of the Rockies is in trouble
• What's killing the aspen? Us.
• Climate Change Killing America's Trees at Ever Faster Rates
• Scientists clone oldest living organism
• Amazing! Go, scientists!! Bo, Baobab, Pandanus, Cannonball, Traveler, Candle, and Grass trees (Just re-read this thread for old time's sake. Oh, my, we posted lots and lots of good poems -n- stuff!)
• Meeting a Visitor Watching the mountain all day, I stand on clouds. Suddenly I hear outside my bamboo grove an urgent knock. Arranging my clothes and hat to meet my guest, I see my shoes pasted with yellow leaves. --Yuan Mei
• walnuts fall green hulls turn black this year our squirrels have been slack nuts underfoot with every stride I hear a crack
• Suzhou Park Magnolia trees float out their flowers, Vast, soft, upon a rubbish heap. The grandfather sits still for hours: His lap-held grandson is asleep, Above him plane trees fan the sky. Nearby, a man in muted dance Does tai-qi-quan. A butterfly Flies lightly past his easy trance. A magpie flaps back to its pine. A sparrow dust-rolls, fluffs, and cheeps. The humans rest in a design: One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps. The leaves trace out the stenciled stone, And each is in his dream alone. --Vikram Seth
• Learning the Trees Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree. The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves— Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform— And their venation—palmate and parallel— And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category. Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.” Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt. It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape. Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own. Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it, And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same. Howard Nemerov
• Lovely, Bees. Pine Tree Tops Gary Snyder in the blue night frost haze, the sky glows with the moon pine tree tops bend snow-blue, fade into the sky, frost, starlight. the creak of boots. rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know.
• overhead a great tree hangs in the sky and stars perch
• Gleefully stolen from MoFi: Tree Porn excellent pictures
• Wow, a great forest of 'em! Magnificent.
• Wonderful!
• This is the way that autumn came to the trees: it stripped them down to the skin, left their ebony bodies naked. It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves, scattered them over the ground. Anyone could trample them out of shape undisturbed by a single moan of protest. The birds that herald dreams were exiled from their song, each voice torn out of its throat. They dropped into the dust even before the hunter strung his bow. Oh, God of May have mercy. Bless these withered bodies with the passion of your resurrection; make their dead veins flow with blood again. Give some tree the gift of green again. Let one bird sing --Faiz Ahmed Faiz, "When Autumn Came" trans Naomi Lazard
• On a Tree Fallen Across the Road (To hear us talk) Robert Frost The tree the tempest with a crash of wood Throws down in front of us is not bar Our passage to our journey's end for good, But just to ask us who we think we are Insisting always on our own way so. She likes to halt us in our runner tracks, And make us get down in a foot of snow Debating what to do without an ax. And yet she knows obstruction is in vain: We will not be put off the final goal We have it hidden in us to attain, Not though we have to seize earth by the pole And, tired of aimless circling in one place, Steer straight off after something into space.
• The Maple is a system of posture for wood. A way of not falling down for twigs that happens to benefit birds. I don't know. I'm staring at a tree, at yellow leaves threshed by wind and want you reading this to be staring at the same tree. I could cut it down and laminate it or ask you to live with me on the stairs with the window keeping an eye on the maple but I think your real life would miss you. The story here is that all morning I've thought of the statement that art is about loneliness while watching golden leaves become unhinged. By ones or in bunches they tumble and hang for a moment like a dress in the dryer. At the laundromat you've seen the arms thrown out to catch the shirt flying the other way. Just as you've stood at the bottom of a gray sky in a pile of leaves trying to lick them back into place. --Bob Hicok
• system of posture for wood I LIKE that!
• Poems I think that I shall never read A tree of any shape or breed - For all its xylem and its phloem - As fascinating as a poem. Trees must make themselves and so They tend to seem a little slow To those accustomed to the pace Of poems that speed through time and space As fast as thought. We shouldn't blame The trees, of course: we'd be the same If we had roots instead of brains. While trees just grow, a poem explains, By precept and example, how Leaves develop on the bough And new ideas in the mind. A sensibility refined By reading many poems will be More able to admire a tree Than lumberjacks and nesting birds Who lack a poet's way with words And tend to look at any tree In terms of its utility. And so before we give our praise To pines and oaks and laurels and bays, We ought to celebrate the poems That made our human hearts their homes. --Thomas Disch
• Thankful, my country, be to him who first Brought hither from Australia oversea Sapling or seed of the undeciduous tree Whose grave and sombre foliage fears no burst Of heat from summer-naked heavens, nor thirst Though all the winter is rainless, and the bee Starves, finding not a blossom. Patiently The great roots delve, and feel though deep-immersed Some layer of ancient moisture, and the leaves Perish not, hanging pointed in the sky. To see these lofty trunks gray-barked and broad Wall with clear shade a long white southern road I have been as one devoted, who receives An impulse or a promise from on high. --Robinson Jeffers, "Eucalyptus Trees"
• The Sacred Tree, translated by Malachi McCormick, is a hand-made book for a world gone mad in the pursuit of the unnatural.
• We experience our perceptions. That is our nature, so to speak. Not sure I understand what the pursuit of the unnatural means here.
• *pricks ears* Blackbird poems?
• *?*
• We experience our perceptions. That is our nature, so to speak. Not sure I understand what the pursuit of the unnatural means here. In that hand-made book of poems I referenced (still $30 although I bought my copy at the Independent and Small Press Book Fair in 1992) - that book celebrates living a simple life in natural surroundings, based on the life of Marban, who McCormick describes in his forward as "a hermit in seventh century Ireland..who lived in the forest, somewhere south of Galway bay... His brother, Gualire is king of Connacht... who questions Marban's calling. 'Why don't you sleep in a proper bed?' Marban (is) so persuasive that Guaire wants to give up his kingdom to join him...At that time, Ireland was still largely covered with forests of oak, elm, ash, pin, yew, hazel and holly...We probably should not say that Marban lived in 'the forest' as much as that Guaire lived 'in a clearing.' City life (life in the clearing) is more unnatural, I had thought. Here are some stanzas from the poem as translated, however you might choose to better characterize the hermit's life-style on the scale of artificiality: MARBAN: I HAVE A HUT IN THE WOODS; ONLY GOD KNOWS WHERE IT IS. AN ASH TREE ON ONE SIDE AND A HAZEL - LIKE A SACRED RATH TREE - ON THE OTHER. TWO HEATHER BUSHES AS DOOR POSTS, A HONEYSUCKLE FOR A LINTEL. OAK TREES ARE CLOSE BY; THEY DROP ACORNS FOR THE FATTENING PIGS. MY HUT IS SMALL BUT NOT THAT SMALL; FAMILIAR PATHS LEAD TO IT. A WOMAN IN A BLACKBIRD CLOAK SINGS HER LOVELY TUNE FROM THE ROOF... (The text was writtin in uncel without capitalization, but I transcribed it rather without NONcapitalization to give the flavor.)
• Blackbird poems? How did Bluehorse know that there was such a reference in a book as rare as this? I am constantly amazed by her erudition!
• Thank ye, Dan.
• *blushes* Actually Dan, I'm not really erudite (I just like to keep the masses fooled) when Bees posted, I just RTFP and saw mention of blackbirds. A cycle of blackbird poems, all powerfully imbued with a sense of sacred nature I lubs me some blackbirds. And pomes.
• BlueHorse, you're back: delightful! blackbirds welcome by the fieldfull by the treeful or the flock ravens roosting in the pine grove on the watch for owl and hawk
• Tree Marriage In Chota Nagpur and Bengal the betrothed are tied with threads to mango trees, they marry the trees as well as one another, and the two trees marry each other. Could we do that some time with oaks or beeches? This gossamer we hold each other with, this web of love and habit is not enough. In mistrust of heavier ties, I would like tree-siblings for us, standing together somewhere, two trees married with us, lightly, their fingers barely touching in sleep, our threads invisible but holding --William Meredith
• The Plum Trees Mary Oliver Such richness flowing through the branches of summer and into the body, carried inward on the five rivers! Disorder and astonishment rattle your thoughts and your heart cries for rest but don't succumb, there's nothing so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy is a taste before it's anything else, and the body can lounge for hours devouring the important moments. Listen, the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it into the body first, like small wild plums.
• Tit for Tat I often pass a gracious tree Whose name I can't identify, But still I bow, in courtesy It waves a bough, in kind reply. I do not know your name, O tree (Are you a hemlock or a pine?) But why should that embarrass me? Quite probably you don't know mine. -- Christopher Morley
• Planting a Dogwood Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own. Put down your taproot with its probing hairs that sluice the darkness and create unseen the tree that mirrors you below the ground. For when we plant a tree, two trees take root: the one that lifts its leaves into the air, and the inverted one that cleaves the soil to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf in the eternal blackness of that sky. The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists and bear small button blossoms, greenish white, that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep; draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep. --Roy Scheele
• The Apple Tree Wendell Berry for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon In the essential prose of things, the apple tree stands up, emphatic among the accidents of the afternoon, solvent, not to be denied. The grass has been cut down, carefully to leave the orange poppies still in bloom; the tree stands up in the odor of the grass drying. The forked trunk and branches are also a kind of necessary prose—shingled with leaves, pigment and song imposed on the blunt lineaments of fact, a foliage of small birds among them. The tree lifts itself up in the garden, the clutter of its green leaves halving the light, stating the unalterable congruity and form of its casual growth; the crimson finches appear and disappear, singing among the design.
• The doughty oaks Oaks don’t drop their leaves as elms and lindens do. They evolved no corky layer, no special tricks. They shut off the water. Leaves hang on withering tougher than leather. Wind tears them loose. Slowly they grow, white oaks under the pitch pines, tap roots plunging deep, enormous carrots. By the marsh they turn twisting, writhing aging into lichens, contorted like the wind solidified. In the spring how stubborn how cautious clutching their wallets tight. Long after the maples, the beeches have leafed out they sleep in their ragged leaves. Reluctantly in the buzz and hum they raise velvet antlers flushed red, then flash silvery tassels. At last vaulted green chambers of summer. Ponderous, when mature, as elephants, in the storm they slam castle doors. They all prepare to be great grandfathers, in the meantime dealing in cup and saucer acorns. When frost crispens the morning, they give up nothing willingly. Always fighting the season, conservative, mulish. I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people. --Marge Piercy
• World's giant trees are dying off rapidly, studies show: Ecological 'kings of the jungle' being toppled by forest fragmentation, severe drought and new pests and diseases
• Big trees dying - not unexpected so much as not good :(
• *sigh* Will have to make sure my grandkids get to see the redwoods soon. Their world will be so different.
• 'Oldest living thing on earth' discovered: Ancient patches of a giant seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea are now considered the oldest living organism on Earth after scientists dated them as up to 200,000 years old.
• The cost of global warming may be death for these asexually cloned seagrass Methuselahs. For us, the price of sexuality is death. Enjoy them both while you can?
• Meet Afo, the ancient tree that brought down the Dutch monopoly on cloves.
• Ancient flower lives only on two Spanish cliffs, and uses ants to survive
• It's nearly that time of year again, and the aspens are turning. For those of you who unfortunately won't be able to witness the beauty. Enjoy my favorite fall trees.
• The life and death of a 125-year-old tree (video)
• The vanishing groves: A chronicle of climates past and a portent of climates to come – the telling rings of the bristlecone pine
• Forest Giant: A tree-climbing scientist and his team have learned surprising new facts about giant sequoias by measuring them inch by inch.
• Magnificent Giant Tree: Sequoia in a Snowstorm
• Loss of ancient, big trees becoming a global issue: Big trees are vanishing around the world and often are not being replaced. The loss of these trees can be devastating to other species.
• Why? Oh why must we kill the big trees? Inadvertently, or not.
• We're going to regret this....
• Colorful Leaves of Colorado's Aspen Trees
• 7 Unique Forests of the World
• Naked tree-hugger visits Canada
• Trees Call for Help—And Now Scientists Can Understand: Team identifies the sounds made by drought-stressed trees.
• Timelapse of beautiful, ancient, endangered red pine forest in Ontario
• Death of Trees Correlated With Human Cardiovascular & Respiratory Disease
• Awe-Inspiring Photos of Earth's Oldest Living Trees
• The tree and stars is astounding. Very nice. Some of the pics would be better if they weren't so saturated, IMHO.
• Admire it while you can. Pando may be no more
• Thought extinct since Roman clear cutting, Judean Date Palm grown from 2000 year old seeds.
• The Largest Genome Ever Sequenced Belongs To This Common Pine Tree
• Science! I like it.
• 126 Photos Make Up Single Image of Giant 3200-Year-Old Tree
• Poachers Attack Beloved Elders of California, Its Redwoods
• Artist Rachel Sussman Photographs the Oldest Living Things in the World before They Vanish
• Oops.
• Yareta, The 3,000 Years Old Plant
• So like moss, but even better, like aspen.
  <:(!)