Some Interesting Trees

Boab Tree.

The squat, bulbous boab has provided water, food, medicine, shelter, even burial crypts for Aboriginals, some of who regard the tree as sacred. The boab in Western Australia is known as the Derby prison tree-erroneously, according to |University of Tasmania historian Kristyn Harman and University of Adelaide architectural anthropologist Elizabeth Grant. Though the tree was reputed to be a holding cell or staging area for Aboriginal prisoners en route to Derby. Harman and Grant debunk the story as "a deliberate move to present it as a dark tourism site displaying colonial triumphs over Aboriginal people." 

Montezuma Cypress.

Sixth-grade children from the Colegio Montolinia de Antequera line up in front of a Montezuma cypress known as el Arbol del Tule. The trunk, 119 feet in circumference and roughly 38 feet in diameter, supports a crown the size of almost 2 tennis courts. In the 1990's the Mexican governement re-routed the Pan-American Highway an approved a grant to dig a well for the tree to mitigate damage caused by car exhaust and a falling water table.

Here are two pictures of the tree; the tree is so wide I could not get a wide enough picture on my scanner, so you need to imagine the two pictures together forming one.

Quaking Aspen.

Though it sounds like the heavy in a grade B science fiction flick, the Pando clone, made up of 47,000 tree trunks covering 106 acres and weighing some 13 million pounds, is real. It's a single organism, a quaking aspen that began life as a single seed-possibly tens of thousands of years ago-and spread by sending up shoots from an expanding root system. (is Latin for "I spread.") Each trunk is genetically identical and no more than 150 years old, but the root system may be the oldest living organism on the planet.

Thank you yoko. These are fascinating stories. I must look into National Geographic.

Thank you yoko for this very interesting topi. Like Sue, I must look into National Geographic magazine.

Thank you yoko for posting these amazing trees. I have National Geographic in the office and I saw some other trees as well, but you picked the most interesting.

Still love this post. Thank you yoko.

Here is an interesting tree and someone is having fun in it.