TREES

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

—Rev 8:7

6785 Record Trees

What was the tallest tree of all time is a matter for conjecture. In 1872, in Victoria, Australia, lumberjacks felled a mountain ash that was believed to have been 500 ft. tall. But there is no official record of this.

There are claims that the tallest-ever title should go to a Douglas fir felled in British Columbia in 1940 and said to have measured 417 ft.

The tallest non-sequoia alive today is also a Douglas fir at Quinault Lake Park Trail, Washington. It is 310 ft. tall.

The stoutest living tree is in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is a Montezuma cypress, called the Santa Maria del Tule, and has a girth of 112–113 ft. at a height of about 5 feet from the ground.

In 1770 an European chestnut, known as the Chestnut of the Hundred Horses, measuring 204 ft. in circumference, was found on the edge of Mount Etna in Sicily.

The seeds of all these tremendous trees weigh only about 1/6000th of an ounce.

6786 More Record Trees

The oldest tree recorded was a 4,900-year-old bristlecone pine in Wheeler Peak, eastern California. It was cut down with a chain saw in 1964.

The oldest living tree is also the bristlecone called Methuselah, estimated at 4,600 years in California’s White Mountains.

The most massive living thing on earth is a tree. It weighed an estimated 2,145 tons and has a true girth of 79 feet. It stands in Sequoia National Park, California, and is called General Sherman.

6787 Some More Record Trees

Near Melbourne, Australia, is an eucalyptus tree over 300 feet high and with a girth of over twenty feet. A Douglas fir 299 feet tall has been measured in the West. There is a giant sequoia 331 feet high, and a redwood 364 feet tall with a girth of 47 feet but is reputed to be 3000 years old. A cypress in Mexico has a circumference of 117 feet and a height of 141 feet. Its age is guessed at anywhere from 4000 to 6000 years.

A European chestnut in Sicily has a recorded girth of 204 feet. What is thought to be the most massive nut-bearing tree is an oak in San Benito Valley, California, which yielded a ton of acorns in a single season on its 125-foot height and 37½-foot girth.

6788 Largest Shade Tree

The famous Zaman tree in Venezuela, though not unusual in height or girth, had an enormous branch spread which yielded a shade with a circumference of 614 feet (and every bough was festooned with orchids). A sycamore in Indiana with a height of 150 feet and a girth of over 42 feet has been called the largest shade tree in America.

6789 A Seedling Before Christ

Some years ago a giant sequoia tree was cut down in California. After a detailed examination to determine the age and history of the tree, scientists made this report:

“This sequoia was a seedling 271 years before Christ. 516 years later, that is 245 years after Christ, it was severely damaged by a forest fire. At once nature set to work to heal the wound by growing layers of living tissue over the gigantic scar left by the flames. In another century the wounds had been completely healed. In later years two more fires damaged the tree. The first of these had been entirely healed and the second was almost healed when the tree was finally cut down.”

6790 Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology is the science of reading age and climate from the growth rings of trees. Experts in the science can calculate how long a tree has been growing and which were the years of sunshine or rain. Such a study was made of specimens of bristlecone pine at the University of Arizona. They revealed an estimated age of 3000 or 4000 years.

—Selected

6791 Proportion Of Tree to Roots

Woodsmen report that, roughly estimated, the root spread of a tree equals the spread of its branches, though there are exceptions such as the saguaro. Perhaps one-tenth of a tree, they suggest, is concealed in its roots. The combined length of the roots of a large oak would total several hundred miles. The giant saguaro of the southwest desert region spreads its roots laterally as much as forty or fifty feet underground from the trunk. Hair-like as some tree roots are, an entire system of them exerts a tremendous pressure.

For instance, a birch tree, though less sturdy than many others, can lift a boulder weighing twenty tons. A good root system serves two purposes in the tree’s development: it functions as an anchor and the roots collect moisture, without which the tree could not thrive.

6792 Weddings And Trees

Town authorities in Herbstein, Germany, decided that every newly-married couple must plant three sapling birches on the Strasse der Ehe, or Marriage Road. Within a year, 150 white-barked birch trees stood along the road. Authorities report that the custom is attracting more weddings to Herbstein, and that brides and grooms return on wedding anniversaries to check on their trees.

—NANA-WNS

6793 Company Offers Trees To Customers

Most advertisers lure young customers to their products with offers of model racing cars or “surprise” toys. Hunt-Wesson Foods has a different ploy: trees. In the wake of a wave of forest fires that swept the Pacific Northwest, the California food-processing company offered to plant a seedling tree in the fire-ravaged forests in the name of anyone who sent in a label or code number from a can of its Big John’s Beans ’n Fixin’s.

More than 200,000 requests were received in ten months, and an equivalent number of Ponderosa pine seedlings were planted in Washington’s Wenatchee National Forest. The company mailed out a certificate to each respondent in the name of Hunt-Wesson and the U. S. Forest Service stating that he or she had “participated in a national forest-building program.”

The gimmick was so successful that Hunt-Wesson launched something called the National Children’s Forest—a tree would be planted in one of three national forests in the name of every moppet who mailed in a label from any of nine of the company’s most popular products. In three months the company received 173,000 requests, and the response shows no sign of flagging. Cost to Hunt-Wesson could reach $1,000,000.

6794 Bank Replaces A Tradition

When the highest beam on its 55-story headquarters was riveted in place the Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles dispensed with the tradition of hoisting aloft an evergreen tree. The bank chose instead to donate the price of 50,000 pine seedlings to the U. S. Forest Service to reforest 102 acres in Los Padres National Forest, north of Santa Barbara.

—Money

6795 Future Needs In Trees

Getting ready for enormous orders in 1999 is causing paper companies to launch massive tree-planting programs.

To meet the mushrooming demands for everything from newsprint to tissues and paper plates, paper producers will have to double their current output of fifty million tons a year before the turn of the century.

In preparation for the needs of the future, experts are breeding seedlings that grow faster, produce better pulpwood, and resist disease.

—Gospel Herald

6796 Because Grandfather Planted

I shall never forget a ride I had in the early days of 1955. A lumber merchant friend of mine drove me in a jeep up Mt. Cushman in Vermont. Near the tip of the mountain I noted some six-inch deciduous seedlings. I asked him when they would be good as lumber and he replied, “In the year 2015 A.D.” Since that was far beyond his span of years, I asked him why he had planted these trees and he replied, “Because my grandfather planted some on the other side of the mountain for me.”

—Philip Lovejoy

6797 Letter Received After Collision

Driving home one night in a thick fog near Birmingham, England, I collided with a tree. While recovering from my injuries, I received a letter from the “Friends of the Trees,” it stated in part, “and we understand that you are responsible for considerable damage to a very fine specimen. The people of this Nation are trustees of a great and beautiful heritage, our trees—and, Sir, we strongly condemn your recent willful attack on a defenseless tree.”

—Reader’s Digest

6798 A God-Made Object

“When I am finishing a picture,” Mare Chagall explained, “I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s clash between the two, it is bad art. That’s something I have understood,” he added, “only these last ten years.”

—Saturday Evening Post

6799 Coffee Plants Of Nyassaland

A little coffee plant was growing in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens. It was sent across the ocean to Nyassaland. In sixteen years the one plant produced five million plants, and the coffee culture became the chief source of prosperity.

—Cut Gems

6800 Travels Of Rubber Trees

Many interesting tales of adventure stem from projects of seed transfer. For instance, the rubber tree was originally a native of Brazil. Back in 1876 Sir Henry Wickam collected 70,000 seeds, packed them between layers of banana leaves and shipped them to London. At the Royal Botanic Gardens they were planted and 2000 of the seedlings were sent to Ceylon where they eventually became a source of latex for rubber.

From Ceylon, rubber plants were dispatched to Malaya and Sumatra, which became producers of the bulk of the world’s rubber. In 1934 Henry Ford sent to Malaya for rubber seedlings that he ordered sent to Brazil, hoping to raise his own rubber there. Thus they came back to their land of origin.

6801 As Anti-Pollution Device

An acre of vigorously growing young trees in a commercial forest may provide five or six tons of pure, fresh oxygen, as well as producing four tons of new wood.

That makes the growing commercial forest a better anti-pollution device than man has come up with so far.

6802 Trees And Climate

A phenomenon not often thought about is the fact that trees affect climate. Winter temperatures may range as much as nine degrees higher in a forest than in cleared areas. Summer temperatures will be as much as five degrees cooler. Casualty companies that offer insurance against hail are aware that destructive deluges of hail are rare in forested areas. They set their rates accordingly.

6803 The Banana Tree

The banana tree is sturdy and resilient even if it looks weak. Unbelievable as it seems to be, no fire or typhoon can kill it. Even if one cuts its body into a thousand pieces, it still can survive. The only way by which a banana tree can be prevented from growing again is to uproot it completely.

6804 Strange Fruit Tree

Bread-fruit tree of Australia produces fruit on its branches when it is young; on its trunk when it is middle-aged; and on its roots when it is old.

6805 The Palm Tree

Of all the trees on all continents, the palm tree is most useful. The encyclopedia tells us that there are eight hundred different uses for the palm tree.

6806 Forest Of Dwarf Trees

The most remarkable forest in the world has been found on the west coast of Africa. Although the trunks of the trees are as much as four feet in diameter, they attain a height of only one foot. No tree bears more than two leaves, which attain a length of six feet and a breadth of two feet. The forest covers a tableland six miles in width.

6807 The Joshua Tree

No traveler, passing through the Mohave misses the fantastic “Joshua trees” that straggle across the landscape, gaunt spectres, twisted in shape, ghostlike whether dead or alive, and fairly demonical in the moonlight. They are so many; and yet there is no forest of them. Each plays the part of lone wolf. And, like the wolf, it refuses to be civilized. There are no Joshua trees transplanted to the artistically landscaped lawns of California.

Yet this extraordinary plant is a species of the lovely, highly-cultured lily family! Botanists call it the yucca-palm, or tree-yucca. In its greenest, thriftiest stage it attains a height from thirty to forty feet, and its branchlike growths, covered with needles, for pompoms of velvety softness—at a distance. But when a traveler comes closer he dares not lay hand upon the stilletto- edged leaf-blades, for the flowers are a dirty white and emit a most offensive odor.

No one save an Indian, desert-born, feels any familiarity with this savage sentinel of the plants; but we are told that Indian squaws find some way of gathering the sword-guarded seeds which they eat raw or grind into meal for mush.

6808 The “Stinging” Tree

A terrible tree grows in Australia called by the natives “the stinging tree.” Try to imagine a monster nettle if you want to get a little idea of its characteristics. Luckily, it has a very unpleasant odor, so that the natives and animals can more easily avoid it. At first the sting or prick of the tree’s thorns does not trouble one at all; he feels no pain whatever.

But in a few minutes he is in agony. Weeks and months afterward he suffers if water touches the wound. When a dog is pricked by it, it is pitiful to hear him whine and cry, and to see him bite pieces of flesh from the place that has been stung.

6809 The Maguey

There is a species of century-plant called the maguey. It grows for years with great, coarse leaves as thick as your two hands, broad as three, and long as twenty. It puts out sharp thorns, and is as ugly a thing as it grows, and it gets worse all the time. But suddenly it shoots up in a few days a great shaft, tall and thick as a small telegraph pole, and decks its spreading head with thousands of flowers. The possibility of all that fragrant beauty was always in that detestible ugliness.

6810 Two-In-One Tree

In southern New Jersey I noticed a clearing where once stood oak and pine timber. In the distance were charcoal pits and racks of cord wood. I saw, however, that the woodman had spared one tree which stood about fifty feet from the road. Wondering why it was allowed to live, I paused to investigate, and noticed this peculiar freak in nature. About eight feet apart, at the base, two perfect trees were growing, each about ten inches in diameter. About six feet from the ground, they arched over and united in one trunk, and then proceeded upward with but one tree-top.

—Obadiah

See also: Vegetation.