This newsletter presents a small, weekly collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own world building and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other writers, too.
I didn’t plan to do all trees for May Day, but here we are. I also didn’t plan to share three things that you have probably already seen on social media before — posts about the world’s oldest and largest trees frequently get circulated online, so it’s probably not news.
What makes this particular set of articles really stand out for me, though, is the enthusiasm and poetry of the writing. It’s one thing to state a fact — a fact can catch your interest, make you sit up and say, “Oh, neat!” But when you a tell the story behind the facts, it invites you to engage with the information on a deeper level. To think of the fact not in isolation, but as part of the continuum of space and time which we occupy. Because none of us — trees or people — are in this alone, and it’s only when we tell stories that we can really begin to contextualize what that means.
Your assignment this week (is this a new feature?) is to answer three things:
What are the trees staring at?
What whispers have the trees heard?
Where are the trees going?
You may choose to answer with science or story, depending upon your inclinations. Both demand an equal level of imagination.
The Trees Are Staring Back
After a long, fruitful day of investigating a fascinating pocket of nature, I was looking for a spot to spend the night. The trees, flowers, and mosses confirmed what I had started to suspect: The ground was too damp for a comfortable night. My shoulders sagged a touch as I conceded to myself that I would need to move on to a drier spot. This was a little disappointing near the end of a long day outdoors, so I sat on an old stump for a snack to summon the energy for a push up into the nearby hills. While I was eating some dried fruit, I stared, only partially in focus, at a wall of mixed trees in front of me. After about a quarter of an hour of not thinking of or looking for very much, I noticed the trees staring back at me.
After the energy from my snack had reached my brain, I realized what was going on. I suddenly appreciated what I was looking at and it was something I’d never taken the time to think about before.
And then a minor observation blossomed into a small epiphany. A new natural navigation clue seized me. Seconds later I had more energy than I needed. I could have run in circles with excitement. Instead, I paced frenetically around every tree in the area.
Read more: Tree Eyes Can Help Us Find Our Way
Sculpted by Time
“You can see the weather on them,” said Smithers. “It’s like that really old farmer, who has hands that are as rough as sandpaper, and you know that man is dirt-tough—you can see it.”
The trees’ response to the direction of the wind is also apparent. “They will allow tissue to die on the windward side, so they have a really scraggly look to them. It’s absolutely beautiful,” Smithers said.
Credit adaptation with the unique growth patterns of Bristlecone trunks. “They grow off to one side for a while, then the other side,” said Smithers. That gives them their twisty, unintentional makeup.“ Some twist because it gives them more strength.”
Bristlecone pine needles are about one inch long and grow in tight-knit packets of five. Cones develop in a deep purple color, which helps absorb heat, until they eventually turn brown. The cones’ claw-like bristles give the tree its name.
The bark is fairly unremarkable, according to Smithers. “It’s where the bark has come off the tree, where part has died, and you can see the wood behind the bark—that’s when you see really cool colors.”
“It’s like a work of art sculpted by the climate.”
Read more: Meet Nevada’s Bristlecone Pines, Some of the Oldest Trees on Earth
To Spread Across the Land
On one of the first warm spring days in thousands of years after the last ice age, a single Aspen seed floating 9,000 feet in the sky came to rest on the southeastern edge of the Fishlake Basin. A land littered with massive volcanic boulders, split apart along an active fault line, carved by glaciers, littered with mineral rich glacial till and shaped by landslides and torrential snow melts that continue to this day.
What would appear to be a wasteland to the untrained eye, made for a perfect home for the Pando seed. A location along the steep side of a spreading fault zone that provides water drainage to the lake below and a barren landscape with rich soil laid down by glaciers. A place where the light hungry Pando seed would have faced no competition for sunlight. Underground, a tumultuous geologic landscape favors Pando’s sideways moving roots system where other native trees prefer to dig down.
Able to grow up to 3 feet per year, if we saw the first branch of Pando, we would have thought nothing of it. Those first years, any number of disasters could have destroyed the tree altogether. In fact, for Pando to exists at all, means at least one disaster, set the tree on a new course that created the tree have today. As a male tree, Pando only produces pollen so, to advance itself over the land, Pando replicates itself by sending up new stems from its root, a process called suckering. Some time in those first 150 years of Pando’s life, something disrupted the growth hormones underground and hormones in the trunk, creating an imbalance and Pando began to sucker. Although there’s no way to tell what that force was, we do know that was the moment Pando started to self-propagate, spread across the land, and toward us in time. Today, that one tree has become a lattice-work of roots and stems that a rapid field estimate by Dr. Paul Rogers suggests, could stretch 12,000 miles or, halfway around the world.
Read more: The Pando Tree - Life on The Boundary Between Discovery and Imagination
I love trees, so I was already predisposed to enjoy this post. But I've read it twice now. Thank you for putting it together, and bringing it out into the light. This was exactly what my morning needed.