noreply

Our gratitude to Kottke who rummaged up this heartening article from the archives of the Atlantic regarding a municipal project in Melbourne that had some unexpectedly touching outcomes.
The superintendent of the city’s parks and gardens assigned individual, monitored email addresses to every tree on public and private land so that residents could report potential problems—like an errant branch threatening to snap a power line.  Instead, however, Melbourne was rather overwhelmed with affectionate and appreciative correspondence from humans to their arboreal neighbours. Most of the messages were one way, but city officials took the time to answer some of the senders’ inquiries, especially when there was a teachable moment—such as explaining the concept of gender in trees. I wonder if this initiative continues, and it is also positive to note that the interconnected Internet of Things is not just potentially paternalistic and judgmental but can also elicit notice, empathy and protective instincts and elevate things above their utility.

antipodal

Amusing Planet brings us the story of the planet’s loneliest tree, a stunted Sitka spruce, and how this transplant is the perfect candidate to mark the separation of the Anthropocene geological epoch. While on a survey expedition, Uchter Knox, Earl of Ranfurly and Governor of New Zealand, visited the remote Campbell Island and was possessed for to plant a tree on this otherwise treeless piece of land, whose climate is hostile to anything growing above ground level.
The specimen that Knox choose, however, is indigenous to a strip of coast in British Columbia—from the opposite ends of the Earth almost—and while not exactly qualifying as an invasive species, the spruce having taken root but never matured to produce cones, it does demonstrate the effect that humans have on the environment. Moreover, the tree is a contender for a “golden spike,” a symbolic milestone like the ceremonial final spike driven that marked the completion of the North American transcontinental railroad that arraign other epochal transitions like the asteroid strike that ended the Paleocene and age of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years hence, as the tree is also a living record of humanity’s attempt to harness and weaponise nuclear fission and fusion. In order to demonstrate that the impact of nuclear testing was truly pervasive and global—that no one was out of range, no matter how isolated or removed—researchers took core samples of the Sitka spruce and found traces of the radioactive carbon isotope that is the signature sign of atomic explosions especially concentrated in the growth rings that corresponded to the mid-1960s when testing was at its peak.

skógræktin

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake shares a short but rather remarkable video on the efforts to reforest Iceland and return it to the state it was, some twenty to forty percent woodland coverage, before the arrival of the Vikings and the clearing to make room for agriculture and grazing lands. Lack of trees contribute to extreme weather in the country as well as diminishing returns on farming and pastures as soils erodes, threatening to turn the island into a desert. Learn more at the links above.

shinrin-yoku

We really appreciated this formal introduction to one of our favourite pasttimes from the New Yorker on the Japanese therapeutic practise of forest bathing (森林浴) and learning of all the collateral benefits through the soft-focus portfolio of Tokyo-based photographer Yoshinori Mizutani. Both scientists and physicians recognise its spectrum of benefits in curbing stress and anxiety and boosting overall well-being. Learn more about shinrin-yoku at the link above and get inspired to carve space out in your day to commune with the trees in your local greenspace.

sacred grove

We appreciate Boing Boing for acquainting us with a quite fine website called Monumental Trees that has aggregated over thirty-thousand outstanding exemplars, whose multilingual platform features a global map of venerable specimens, including one of our local favourites (all trees are great). The catalogue of this living project is growing and invites contributions of particularly aesthetic candidates—though I hope after seeing the destructive potential of fame and beauty, we have a more mature understanding of celebrity and what all Nature does for us.

daytrip: hochrhön

We had the chance to do a bit of local exploring near our home and we found the ruin (die Mauerschädel as it’s singularly known) of a fortified church built around the year 1000 and abandoned about three centuries later during the height of the plague (Pest) in the fields behind the village of Filke, the inter-German border separating Bavaria from East Germany once passing through the nave of the structure.
In the 1970s, the whole of the structure was ceded to Bavaria for security purposes. Though the outbreak of the plague is considered the likely culprit for its eventual abandonment, another anachronistic suggestion is that once bulwarks of the region, Filke and other surrounding settlements that essentially became ghost-towns before being eventually repopulated sacrificed themselves to the marauding tribes of the Huns, able to Christianise the scouting parties only to be later betrayed and massacred. A maiden in white is said to haunt the grounds, but that is a relatively recent embellishment.
Afterward, we took another detour to see some marshland in a nature reserve (the whole region is a nature reserve, really, but there are also specially designated areas that are protected from traffic and development) but the trails didn’t really get very near and the scrub separating it from the path was intimidating. H and I did however get the chance to explore the deep woodlands and encountered some deer that bounded past us before we could react.
More our pace, however, we found an assortment of mushrooms and toadstools that we resolved to learn about and come back to the clearing where they seemed to thrive.
The forest directly behind our house are baronial lands, still in the same family, and we wouldn’t want to be accused of poaching.

xylotheque

The intrepid explorers of Amusing Planet introduce us to a very special sort of “book” depository curated in locations across Europe and beyond that began with the advent of modern forestry in the eighteenth century.
Botanists began forming libraries whose stacks contained wooden books that were compartments that held the twigs, fruit, root and bark samples of different sorts of trees—ξύλον being Greek for wood and θήκη a library. The word book in English itself is a cognate of the Germanic word for the beech tree, with early writing carved on blocks of wood. The pictured shelf is part of the Schildback Xylotheque located in the city of Kassel and there’s much more to be found at the link up top.

hanami or casting shade

Æon magazine features an excellent essay by conservationist and philosopher Rebecca Gibbs on the celebration of Sakura (サクラ) , the short season of cherry trees going to blossom in Japan (read more about Japan’s concept of microseasons here), that’s customarily attended with hanami (花見) that is holding family and company picnics to enjoy and appreciate the transient beauty of the explosive over-abundance of Nature.
Informed in part by Buddhist teachings stressing the pathos or empathy toward the surrounding world, Gibb argues that these traditions that have been fostered for centuries does a better job in encouraging the public to care about environmental stewardship than the more tone-deaf and abstract campaigns that the West usually rely on. Appreciating a tree like the Lorax as a biome, a source of shade, oxygen, a home for birds and bugs is the message of Sakura, and it doesn’t demand one acknowledge a deeper beauty or go in search of one—after all, there are other well-established and familiar Japanese customs in gardening and pruning that speak to the cultural aesthetic, and seems like one that we are failing to grasp and adopt. What do you think? Perhaps we are all beginning to realise that Nature is not something separate from ourselves and our experience.

wokey the bear

Via the ever inspiring Nag on the Lake comes a series of prints based on the original US National Parks promotional posters produced as a part of the federal arts offensive of the Works Progress Administration—except that Hannah Rothstein’s work shows what the fate of these treasured places will be if nothing is done to halt and reverse climate change. It’s a bit bleak but there’s hope yet, since if we work together and are truly committed, this vision is not an inevitable one.

june bride oder baumbastik

Amusing Planet has a nice profile and appreciation of the Bridegroom’s Oak (die Bräutigamseiche) of the Dodauer Forest of Eutin—north of Lübeck, a tree with its own postal code (Postleitzahl) and recipient of human correspondence and secret-keeper.
While the tree’s origins might be conflated with myth and the message of missionaries, the tradition of letter-writing can be traced back to historical star-crossed lovers. A forester’s daughter and the son of a Leipziger chocolatier used the oak as a letter-drop cite for their liaisons—to their parents’ initial disapproval. Later the parents relented and the pair was wed under the trees boughs in June 1891. Their fame spread by word of mouth and people began writing to the tree in hopes of finding true love. Letters deposited in the tree’s trunk are open to public-inspection and several matches have been made over the years. The Bridegroom’s Oak was itself married to the Holy Ghost horse chestnut (die Himmelgeister Kastanie) in April of 2009—across Germany in the Ruhrgebiet near Düsseldorf. The two seem to be handling their long-distance relationship quite well.

inholding

Satellite views of some rural areas of US northwest reveal forested lands that have distinctive chequerboard patterns—almost like the transparent colour tool in digital imagery, whose origins reach back to the mid nineteenth century when federal lands were parcelled to corporations and individuals in such an alternating fashion, beginning with railroad land grants along transportation corridors.
The public retained the spaces in between—these are square mile lots—as wooded refuges buffeted by grazing land managed by homesteaders, and hoped to benefit economically as improved infrastructure increased the value of federal holdings. The government planned to sell the remaining parcels at a profit but this real estate bubble failed to foment as most people motivated to resettle and go West weren’t people of means to begin with and could not afford plots adjacent to the railways and most went unsold or were given away wholesale.

baubotanik

An architect and gardener in Nagold, a town south of Stuttgart, finding inspiration in the gentle, patient coaxing of bonsai trees and topiary cultivating, has grown a series of towers that fuse a minimum of man-made construction materials with living branches. These creations won’t be supplanting traditional building for human habitation but could also prove very suitable sanctuaries for other fauna and the extensive research that went into their design will surely inspire others.  You can read more about tree-houses here, here and here.

arboretum

Amusing Planet has a touching and gentle appreciation of Survivor Trees from all corners of the globe that bore witness all sort of human catastrophe and crime, but withstood the wreckage brought to its boughs and remained standing as a memorial. One of the more poignant profiles is that of the Miracle Pine that somehow made it through the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 when everything else was washed away. This lone sentinel sadly too succumbed to the aftermath of the massive flood, poisoned slowly over the following months by salt water. An artificial tribute was put in its place and a high lookout tower surrounds it.

incident and diffusion or the worshipful company of carpenters

When I first read about the Royal Institute of Stockholm having engineered transparent wood—that could eventually replace windows and the glass of solar panels, I was bit sceptical as the announcement coincided with April Fools’ Day and was proud of myself for having not been taken and falling prey to a prank.
Now the development is confirmed, however, with the process of chemically stripping the lignin (which is the stuff of paper pulp) and replacing it with an epoxy, a strengthening agent, being reproduced by a team at the University of Maryland. As a natural insulator, replacing pains and other architectural materials with see-through wood could see immense savings in climate-control, not to mention industrial costs buried in extraction and refining. Can you think of other applications for this rather amazing sounding treated timber?

arboreal

This outstanding tubular concept dwelling, first proposed and subsequently dropped by investors back in 2013, may now have a new lease on life after glass and solar panel manufacturers expressed interest in Aibek Almassov’s designs.
I don’t know what the terrain is like in rural Kazakhstan but I would imagine that such retreats in the woods are the bailiwicks of the wealthy and privileged however much forested land was available. I do like the idea that the support column is a living tree that one lives with but not sold on the idea that such arrangements could have a small, hidden footprint on the environment with all the other things people need in their range, like roadways and plumbing at minimum. I suppose, however, such roosts could be logistically supported by delivery drones and be designed to self-sufficient and sustaining. If we could have such a leap-frogging lifestyle, that would be a pretty keen thing indeed.

enhanced vegetation index

Recently ecologists endeavoured to take a more accurate census of the number of individual trees, as each comprises an arboreal habitat within its own branches and is also a part of a larger, contiguous network of the forest.
Taking to the woods with clipboards and questionnaires, researchers discovered that their previous estimates on the total, global tree population—relying mostly on satellite images that showed ground cover and calculating the percentages of wild and cultivated land, were off by almost a power of ten: instead of some four hundred billion leafy compatriots, there are some three trillion. The old methods did not take into account the shifting densities that the census-takers encountered in their surveys, and the demographic projections seem to be solid and rigorous—not just another model to be later prised apart. The findings are optimistic (forests are more robust in some parts of the world than they were a century ago) but we humans still are not good stewards of the environment and could prove to be an important point of departure for further sustainability studies and determining how much room is needed to grow and thrive.

sylvan

H and I must make it a point to explore the extensive, almost primordial forests this year. Though not contiguous, unlike the ancient forests that must have covered the whole of Europe long ago and fossilised in the city named Pforzheim (from the Latin Porta Hercynia, the gateway to the Black Forest which must have extended without much interruption to the ends of the Earth) there is besides the Kellerwald, the Bavarian Wood plus reserves throughout the country, covering more than one third of the land. This protected space is not of course historic in range but does represent more wooded areas than Germany had a century ago. The majority of the forests in Germany are composed of beech and oak, which enjoy a certain reverence for the people, which does not outstrip conservancy with a unifying identity but rather went astride. The Teutoburg Forest was where Arminius (Hermann the Cherusker, the name of a street adjacent to where I stay in Wiesbaden) beat back Roman incursions and kept the land in a sense unconquered, and after the Napoleonic Wars that ultimately meant the demise of the Holy and Roman Empire of the German Nation, a towering monument to that battle was erected, facing down France to the west. The proving ground of the forest, where one if careless can still find himself irretrievably lost, was also an essential factor in for the Brothers Grimm whose folklore that was championed as German identity, those stories that were told by mothers to children generation after generation regardless of where frontiers were or who was in charge.
The mysterious and dangerous wood was the only place where good might triumph over evil, the brothers observed long after trees were considered as sacred markers but yet subconsciousness ones and that character was made a recurring one. In any case, I suppose Germany’s caretaking and conservation would have greatly impressed the warriors and the myth-makers as much as the environmentalists and important to acknowledge it as a part of one’s collective identity in all its aspects.

baumbastik

Watching a documentary in search of Germany's most venerable trees—which featured such specimens as this tree in Salz, a community founded by Charlemagne (Karl der Große) and a suburb of our fair city, Bad Karma, I learned that there is no known tree to have surpassed the millennium mark (those whom might have been in serious contention were felled by Christian missionaries as pagan idolaltry), although at least one noble tree, per the practise of designating separate districts of forest where no one lives, has its own postal code and receives postcards.

This tree pictured is a linden and of advanced age, whose blooms in its boughs are important for the production of honey and was a choice material for wood- carving—the medium employed by Tilman Riemenschneider and other artists. I also learned that the word for beech (Buche, cf., Buch) is derived from the same Proto-Germanic root for book, as before the introduction of parchment and paper, the wood was used for tablets for northern European societies. A sooty pigment called bistre is also obtained by burning the wood and used by ancient people as a form of ink up to modern times with many of the Old Masters for using it for their sketches.

god didn't make the little green apples

Who knew that fruit trees could be so apparently dangerous? One of the most poisonous trees in the world—I am not sure what others are in this category—is native to Florida and the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean and are called Manchineel—from the epithet that early Spanish explorers gave to their poison fruit manzanita de le muerte, little apples of death.

Lots of berries and such are toxic to humans and the apples are bad but not the worst in this tree’s arsenal. Groves of trees have warning signs admonishing the curious to stay far away, as the sap is also extremely caustic (even indirectly) and can cause burns to the skin with exposure and smoke from burning the tree can lead to permanent blindness.  Accounts of early European explorers said that the sap from the Manchineel was the source for poison blow-darts and the other weapons. These trees, however, serve an important ecological role, as their sturdy and mostly undisturbed system of roots helps prevent beach erosion.