Trees

Tree within tree

Fig

baobob landscape of Malagasay

The baobobs I saw in South Africa were not that fat.

That's a wonderful Dragon Tree.

Tenerife and La Gomera have many, and for a short while I managed to grow one in a pot in North London (until the first frost arrived way too early)

Madagascar Baobab

American Chestnut

These trees dominated the american woodlands until the early 1900 when they were wiped out by a fungus.

http://www.ourstate.com/american-chestnut/

Thanks, guys. I read that if you pick a flower off a baobab you will be eaten by a lion. I think that's probably true.

Yep, I know about the chestnut. There used to be some nuts left and foresters wanted to reintroduce it by crossing it with an asian chestnut.

Oh, that was unnecessarily harsh. I'm sure they are doing their best to get their weight down.

Australian Boabs

Thhe Glossopteroides (Glossopteris seed fern "tree") was the tree that helped us recreate the paleogeography of the supercontinent of Gondwana. These "trees" had seen their days between the Permian and the Triassic .

there are several new "blight free" chestnut strains that have been developed by doing some gene splicing between Asian chestnuts, some "volunteer" American chestnut whips, and another "host tree" that helps in the blight resistance.
The crossing of Asian and American whips only produced a "Resistant" strain which usually dies at about 20 to 3o years. Ive seen several of these blight immune trees at the PEnn State research center so maybe. (Ive got my name in to get one when theyre available. Which reinforces the addage about optimism)

"Where an old man plants a tree under whose branches he shall never sit"


Of course, I repeat my admonition about all things GM. "We had better employ a better understanding of Dr Mandelbrott and explore the long term effects of anything GM before we just fling it out to the world and then discover later that our good intentions did NOT consider long term negative effects. (sort of like "roundup ready" cisgenes in soybeans has created "Superstrains" of pigweeds and foxtails and some other plants that can smother hay fields with ,toxic or valueless, crap made up of rapid spreading grasses).

I lived at a place once where some kind of chestnut grew nearby. The flowers have an odor. To me, it smelled like something rotting. The seed pods are like Buckeye pods except worse in terms of sharp spines. You have to be careful about walking barefoot around one. It's a food source, though. My favorite tree isn't much good for anything:

Dogwood

I hope that they can one day recover the American Chestnut in its original splendor. The loss of this tree was a devastating blow to an ancient form of woodland which can't really be replicated without it. Those trees produced vast quantities of food (for wildlife as well as people) and prime lumber for building. Their very presence also altered the forrestscape.

The Chinese version of the Chestnut produces a very different nut as well as lumber and doesn't dominate the canopy like its American cousin, so I'm not as enthusiastic about cross breeds or genetic manipulation because I really don't think that the resultant variant will be close enough to the original as I wish they could be.

I was hoping someone would find something which would kill the blight itself. Possibly a blight virus or something. If the blight were removed from the environment these trees, many of which still live as stumps which start to regrow every year, would recover very rapidly on their own. But I haven't heard of anyone trying to attack the blight, so maybe that's just too hard to do.

Angel Oak

Angel Oak is estimated to be 1,500 years old, and is possibly the oldest tree east of the Mississippi. It stands 65 feet (20 m) tall and its crown covers 17,000 square feet (1,600 sq.m.). Many of its limbs are resting on the ground. Heavy-duty metal pipes support branches high up in the air. The longest limb extends 89 feet.

Thats one of the strategies That I heard about at one of the research unis somewhere. I read that"taking the inability of the virus to spread quickly" has been somehow able to do what any good virus should do, that is, by being a long distance "spreader" it would evolve and not KILL its host. Most viruses become, at some point, a chronic infestation that develops an almost commensal relationship, or at least develops a less lethal form with some actual benefits (like Spanish flue or malaria)

It's amazing to read how those magnificent trees affected the local economies and the general environment. I wasn't around to see it, but my grandparents had stories.

I've also wondered if the demise of the Passenger Pigeon was somehow linked to the Chestnut decline. I know that common history explains that people just shot them all to death, and I'm sure that didn't help, but the synchronicity of the Passenger Pigeon decline and the American Chestnut is either meaningful or highly coincidental.