P. 33 The ancient forests of Mount Lebanon contained junipers, firs, and pines, but only cedars became literary metaphors and economic indicators. The reason is resin. Cedar wood contains organic polymers that resist shrinkage, warpage and rot, making it ideal for woodworking. Additionally, its resin can be refined into medicines and salves as well as agents for calking, wood preserving and embalming. When 20th century archaeologists exhumed a ship beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, the 4,500 year old planking still smelled wet. Egypt obtained its everlasting wood from Phoenicia, a group of coastal city states in present-day Lebanon and Syria. Every major power in the ancient Near East traded with Phoenician timber merchants. According to the Torah, some of the best cedar ended up in Jerusalem, after ing Solomon of Israel contracted with King Hiriam of Tyre. Solomon finished the First Temple in aromatic cedar, and for himself constructed an opulent residence called the House of the Forest of Lebanon…. In a wood scarce region, conquest led to recycling. No city has been conquered more times than Jerusalem. P. 34 Through radiocarbon dating, researchers have discovered that Al-Aqua Mosque… was built in part with decaf beams reclaimed from Roman temples, which themselves were made with material taken from the monuments of Herod, the Jewish king who erected the Second Temple. The plunder goes back further, Nebuchadnezzar II sacked Solomon’s Temple in the 6th century BCE… by the Europhrates, Nebuchadnezzar raised a cedar-roofed palace and a decaf- jointed ziggurat. … IN the second century, Hadrian placed the equivalent of 100 “no trespassing” signs around Mount Lebanon. … Today, scrubland surrounds these Roman boundary stones, and people dig around them, looking for buried treasure. P. 3 In the early medieval period, for the first time, large numbers of people moved to the Levantine high country, Mount Lebanon became a refuge for ethnoreligious minorities, notably Maronites (eastern Catholics) who cleared forests and terraced land for cereal crops. On a continuing basis, locals cut trees for firewood and charcoal. Highlanders also tended goats, which nibbled the understory to the ground each season. Conifers did not evolve with mammals, much less grazers. It takes decades for a Cedric’s Lisa I to reach sexual maturation and produce its distinctive upright cones. .. p. 35 Starting around 1550, European pilgrim tourists began journeying to the top of the Qadisha Valley to see these incorruptible relics of biblical time. Visitors obsessively enumerated the grove’s remaining @Ancient Ones@ – specimens coeval with Creation, or the Deluge, or the Prophets… 16th century tallies varied from 23 to 28. The problem became proverbial. The Cedars of Lebanon cannot be counted. By the 19thcentury, the number of “Patriarchs” or “Saints” had fallen as ow as five or ten… p. 39 A new age began in the 1990s. The government gave blanket protection to the national tree, established new reserves, and authorised new plantings of the species. Fr its part, UNESCO gave World Heritage designation to the Qadisha Valley, including the famous grove, now called Arz el-Rab (Cedars of God) in Arabic…. Modellers predict that by 2100 only a handful of high-altitude locations on Mount Lebanon will be able to support cedar – assuming that people continue to assist their migration and defence.”
P. 48 Gingkos even lived through an end of time at the end of the world – Year Zero at Ground Zero. As Hiroshima burned, scores of injured residents who survived the initial impact ran to Shukkein Garden – 1,370 metres from the epicentre – and perished amid the skeletonised trees, including an almost toppled ginkgo. Defying death, the tree used out new buds and generated a second layer of annual good, a double ring for 1945. To this day, the leaning gingko stands… Each autumn peace activists come to collect seeds for distribution around the world… gingko is longevous on two scales – in evolutionary age as a Claude and in biological age as individuals. … At the organismimal level, it avoids senescence, as recently proven at a cellular and molecular levels. A gingko’s ability to do the stuff of living – growing full-sized leaves, photosynthesising, generating viable sperm and seeds, producing anti-microbial chemicals – doesn’t decline over time. Wood production declines slightly past two centuries, but not enough to shift a gingko from its default mode of immortality. The organism dies from external stress, not internal aging…. Catalstrophic injury can lead to life renewal, thanks to lignotubers and aerial roots”… like olives, gingkos hollow out, denying scientists of tree rings and radiocarbon dating going back ten centuries or more.”
P. 50 “Since the 19th century, plant hunters, mainly Westerners, have searched the mountains of China for the oldest, wildest gingkos. To the Chinese, “wild” has little cultural resonance, and little practical meaning. All the land below 1,000 meters in elevation was deforested in ancient times. .. a few old gingko populations exist – as demonstrated by genetic testing – in highland refugia. One of these remnant groups grows adjacent to an important Buddhist monastery at Tianmushan, Zhenjiang province. Did monks plant these trees, or did monks plant themselves here because of these trees?
P. 82 “Firm evidence that baobabs can live 1,000 years came in the 1960s… Southern Africa will continue to get hotter and drier, shrinking the habitat … for as long as ecologists have studied the baobab – just one century – they’ve noted a paucity of young trees as well as centuries gaps between mature cohorts. This is characteristic of various slow-growing, long-lived trees. … the multi year co-occurrence of atmospheric and soil conditions needed for seedling recruitment simply happens rarely. Now that people and livestock have greater footprints and hoof prints – and now that industrial countries have irrevocably alterered he climate of the planet. Who know when that optimal sequence will recur in Africa… now required human care for baobab to remain. 20th century Africa inspired two remarkable tree-planting NGOs. The Men of Trees led by Richard Sr Barbe Baker, and later the Green Belt Movement led by Wangari Marathai. Of the two, Maathai’s Christian feminist indigenous environmentalism seems capable of longer life. Maathai understood the intersectional possibilities of stewarding land, empowering women and reforming government. As the Nobel laureate once said: “ You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care of itself.@ She was talking about a tree, and she was talking about so much more.
P. 86 As dated by the molecular clock, the Taxus family evolved around the end-Cretaceous extinction event. Taxus does well in oceanic climes, and it thrived in the Tertiary period when the planetary north was mild and humid. Then came the Quaternary, when extreme climatic oscillations dried, iced, thawed and re-iced the European subcontinent. Once a hotspot of conifer diversity, Europe was repeatedly, progressively, deconiferised. During deep freezes, Europes’s yews retreated to Mediterranean refugia. With each interglacial, the species faced stiffer competition from aster-growing angiosperms, particularly beeches. T bachata requires decades to reach sexual maturity, and then, to reproduce, requires male and female members as well as avian seed dispersers. In the Holocene … the lowland Med grew too hot and dry for yews. The species advnaages – tolerance for shade, endurance over time – count for more in clement, stable climes.”
“After catastrophic injury, it can restart life from the roots or from epicormic buds in the trunk – even from the stump. … downward growing branches root themselves, then grow new leads upwards. A single old organism can thus compromise a tiny grove. A hollow specimen can even layer from the inside, filling its voice with a new branch-cum-trunk that fuses with the old shell.”
P87 The Palaeolithic Clayton spear – the oldest known woodworked object …. Dates back some 400,000 years. … when Homo heidelbergenisis and Homo Neanderthal is walked the shored of future Albion.. from the bogs of northern Germany and Denmark, archaeologists have dug up hundreds of yew shafts and bows from the Neolithic. The ancient man dubbed Otis – mummified in Tyrolean ice from 5,000 years – carried a stave of yew.”
P. 87 “Taxus is toxic. Every piece of the plant, save one, can poison ruminants, horses, humans – and human cancers, as now evidenced by Taxol … the exception is the aril, the fleshy seed pup that turns bright red in fall. (Yes lack cones, despite being conifers.) The somber foliage – the most chemical part of the tree – occasionally shows up in Greco-Roman sources, and in pathology reports, as a means of suicide.”
P. 90 The latest, best gazetteer goes by the name Ancient Yew Group, an interactive website built on Google Maps. … maintenance of the website falls to one sel-effacing volunteer named Tim Hills….although Tim knows the website will outlive him, he worries that future webmasters may not have the time, resources, or inclination to maintain his high standardS. The ephemeral it’s of digital information haunts him.”
P. 117 From the Revolution onward, the French state had emphasised the protection of built monuments. Revolutionaries and later the Commune defaced or destroyed many edifices; in response, the nation asserted its powers of classification and preservation over royal and ecclesiastical monuments, reimagined as the patrimony of the people. Analogous to gGermn foresters registering ancient trees while modernising the forest, French planners created architectural protection zones while Hausmannizing the city. This top down effort resulted in the seminal 1887 French low on the “conservation of onuments and objects of art of historical and artistic importance”.
P.274 The sweet chestnut did not become the ‘bread tree’ until the early medieval (Carolingian) period. It was the perfect plant for changing times. While the western Roman Empire had existed, rural peoples could produce grapes and grains for export to urban centres. After it fell apart, there were fewer labourers as well as consumers. Economics had to become localised and self-sufficient. Groves of chestnuts required little labour compared to vineyards and wheat fields, and they thrived in hill topographies unsuited to cereal crops. .. the species expanded all over the Italian peninsula, and throughout the western Mediterranean, from the 9th century onwards. .. the fruits of this bio cultural landscape helped to sustain regions such as Campania and Lombardy until the revival of the coastal trade around the 1st millennium BCE, at which point smoked chestnut themselves were a tradeable commodity. … people perfected techniques of breeding, grafting, pruning, compiling and pollarding .. stewards encouraged cycles: feces from goats and sheep became fertiliser for the trees; leaves from he trees became litter for stables; and discarded cupules became additional fertiliser for cereals intercropped between the trees. Even dying chestnuts could be useful as sources of tannic acid for leather making.A well-managed chestnut woodland was sustainable centuries before Europeans invented the idea of sustainability.’
P. 276 “Ink disease” – the consequence of a species of water mould – arrived in Europe in the 18th or early 19thcentury, causing root and collar rot in chestnuts. A century later came chestnut blight, a pathogen that had annihilated the mighty chestnuts of eastern North America. After arriving in Genoa in 1938, the Bligh spread throughout Italy, then France and Spain. People assumed the worst outcome before something unexpected happened – the papers of hypovirulence, or a virus that attacked the fungal pathogen. The phyvirulence transmitted quickly and widely enough to prevent complete devastation, an example of all-natural biological control… Cankered but not killed by blight, old chestnuts have survived in great enough numbers t permit a partial revival of foodways.”
P. 277 @In the 1990s and early 2000s, geographers, anthropologists and historians engaged in a debate about the so-called pristine myth, part of a larger discussion on the ‘trouble with wilderness’. At the end of it all, the intellectual consensus came full circle: experts descibed the pre-colonial Amazon as a “manufactured landscape”, an “anthropogenic forest” and an independent Center of domestication, complete with “garden cities”… a hybrid: a ‘natural’ forest thoroughly interspersed with patches of anthropogenic woodland in which specific tree species achieve ‘hyperdominance’. One of these species is Brazil nut …. A specimen takes decades to reach reproductive age, then starts dropping large, heavy capsules. The fatty, protein rich ‘nuts’ encased inside are technically seeds. Very few creatures can open the woody capsules – large rodents, monkeys, humans. Some scientists speculate that the tree is anachronistic, because the homphotheres (elephant in megafauna) that presumably dispersed the seeds ent extinct some 10,000 years ago. Today, Brazil nuts generally appear in well-spaced population clustered. This pattern does not fit models of random distribution. Of the estimated 16,000 tree species of the Amazon, Castaneda is one of a handful that is wildly over-represented. Others include Marisa palm, rubber tree, and cocoa trees – all similarly useful to humans. … Paleo-Indians … creating and managing stands of trees that provided food perennially, supplementing annual crops such as squash and cassava. All the evidence about Brazil nut – including he near-uniform genetic composition of many stands – suggests that humans have for millennia been its primary dispersal agent.”
P. 286 Wollemi pine “counts as a living fossil, though less definitively than Gingko for it still has relatives at the family level. With its primitive branching system, Wollemia bears a spindly resemblance to the monkey puzzle tree, its Chilean in… a few hundred persevere in the wild – four stands total… a single system of sandstone slot canyons in the Blue Mountains…p. 288 at the genomic level, the 90-odd-million-year-old Wollemia genus is moribund. Barely any diversity exists in the four remaining stands.”
P. 288 One of two types of elderflora that Australians suddenly appreciated in the late 20th century. The other example … came from southwest Tasmania, involving a species called Huon pine, which, like Wollemi pine, is not a pine. It’s closest relative, a fellow polo carp – a family of southern conifers – occurs in New Zealand. .. the 1980s, when the government commissioned a survey of the species. By this point, 90% of all stands had been logged. … cored living specimens over 1,000 years old … every Huon pine on Mount Read was male. After determining that this hectare-sized population represented a single genet – one clinal superorganism – they tried to measure its place time. By radiocarbon dating onsite wood as well as pollen from an adjacent lakebed, they assembled strong evidence that the organism had been growing in place for at least 10,000 years.”
P. 294 There is no Ur-tree ancestor common to all plants that people honour as trees, by which I mean largish single-trucked plants that live a longish time. Arborescence (treeness) has happened – and unhappened – many miles in evolutionary history. Plants are nothing if not plastic. Some herbaceous plants like strawberries have woody ancestors, while some woody plants like mulberries have herbaceous ancestors… aborescence exemplifies convergent evolution…. Even grasslike angiosperms (monocots) can achieve treelike form if they produce enough lignin to rigidity and thicken their outer tissue Palms are monocots that can grow taller than most lignophytes. Other monumental monocots include dragon trees and Joshua trees, both in the asparagus family. .. cycads in particular defy categorisation. They have plamlike fronds, but they are gymnosperms, unrelated to palms. They produce some of the most amazing ones in nature without being conifers. They contain wood yet lack growth rings. In terms of evolutionary age, they rank among the oldest plants that people call trees, though people rarely do.”
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