Ode to Trees

The beauty and mystery of these sturdy beasts

Oct 27, 2024

This is an extension of my last post, honoring fall. What is the one thing most people are noticing in the fall? Trees. Most people love looking at trees in the fall as the trees put on a spectacular show this time of year. However, not all people may appreciate the trees in the fall, some people are color-blind, some hate the smell of burning leaves and hate to rake them off of their lawns. But those are leaves. Trees are so much more interesting than just the color and smell of their yearly shedding.

I thought I would write 10 interesting things about trees, as I read the book The Hidden Life of Trees a year ago and found it fascinating. This week I went to the library to check that book out again and found two more fascinating books about trees. Ahhh!! That’s too much to read, but I want to read them all. You know how that goes.

So here are some facts about trees.

There are 73,000 species of trees in the world, 881 known species in the United States. 294 are native to Illinois, where I reside.
The most common tree in the U.S. is the Red Maple, although our national tree in the Oak.
The tallest trees are the redwoods. The tallest known tree, named Hyperion (I love that they name trees), was measured at 379 feet in 2006. I imagine it is even taller now.
The oldest known Redwood tree is 2,200 years old, which is not the oldest tree over all. The oldest tree is a Bristlecone Pine which is over 5,000 years old. Some leaves on Bristlecone Pines can stay green for 50 years. There are researchers who claim Bristlecone Pines could live indefinitely under the right conditions. What would the right conditions be? If it was living in an arboretum? Hmmmm.
Trees can communicate with one another through their roots systems and by releasing chemicals from their leaves.
A tree is an ecosystem in itself. A single oak tree can support 400 different insect species. The redwoods in California host all sorts of species in their canopies, even other trees. Also, there is a salamander, Aneidas vagrans (wandering salamander) that lives its whole life in the canopy of redwoods. You can watch videos of a salamander falling on YouTube. They are fascinating and fall like a skydiver in free fall.
Forests on the continental coasts help it rain on the interiors of the continents by releasing water vapor to form clouds and then rain further inland.
Hanging out around trees can improve your mental and physical health
Trees have a sense of time. If the winter is unusually warm you’ll notice plants emerging earlier, but trees will start the new growth year typically based on the amount of light. However, it knows the difference between the light in spring versus the light in fall, based on the temperature. So if you take a tree from the northern hemisphere and replant it in the southern hemisphere it will know that spring and fall are reversed.
Trees are cool. That’s a fact.

Are you still with me? Have you read this far? You must love trees, too. Thanks for letting the biologist in me geek out for a while. If you found any of this interesting, and think other would too,

These are the three books I got all this information from, except for number 1 and 2 which I just quickly did a google search. They are great books and I recommend them all, even if I am still reading some of them. Hopefully you can get them at your library, like I did.

The Hidden Life of Trees (What They Feel, How They Communicate)by Peter Wohlleben

Twelve Trees (The Deep Roots of Our Future) by Daniel Lewis

The Wild Trees (A Story of Passion and Daring) by Richard Preston

I’ll leave you with a link to the poem Trees by Joyce Kilmer

Now go out and touch a tree, sit under one, or walk amongst them if you can.

If you have a favorite tree or a story about trees or you just want to say hi,