The Wild Trees

"The cambium of a redwood, its ever-changing self beneath the bark, may be as thin as a single layer of living cells, invisible to the naked eye, identifiable only in a microscope. If the cambium of a giant redwood were spread out in a flat sheet, it would cover more than a soccer field, perhaps. A giant redwood that is adding one or two millimeters of thickness to its wood layer in a year is adding huge amounts of material to itself, and is one of the fastest-growing organisms in nature. That a redwood seems to be growing slowly is merely an illusion of human time."  -Richard Preston, from his book The Wild Trees

I studied trees in school because I find them fascinating.  I am dumbfounded whenever I find someone who isn't as infinitely intrigued with these spectacular manifestations of life as I am.

I'm not trying to be snooty about the area of academia that I dabbled in... I truly just don't understand the idea of not being totally enamored with these organisms.  They manage to be quiet yet thrilling, serene yet commanding, and humble yet majestic.  They are truly one of the universe's finest creations.

They give us everything.  Everything.  Clean water, clean air, desks, doors, books, bookshelves, fruit, shade, and splashes of spectacular seasonal color.  Vibrant, new bursts of chartreuse green in the springtime, mature palettes of deep greens in the summer, an unending rainbow of colors in the autumn, and sculpture-esque art forms in shades of gray to grace our front yards in the winter.

"What is left of the virgin redwood forest is like a few fragments of stained glass from a rose window in a cathedral after the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away.  A redwood is a tough tree, however, and when the tree is burned or sheared off at its base it has the ability to send up new sprouts around the stump. In the fullness of time, the root sprouts can become a circle of redwood trees, which is called a faerie ring. If all the trees in the ring sprouted from one stump, the ring is essentially a single organism. The DNA of all the redwoods in such a fairy ring is the same -- in other words, the trees in the ring are clones, joined through their roots. A redwood fairy ring that has grown old and vast, and has fallen partly into ruins, is known as a cathedral..."