Max Adams

There are rumours in the scientific community that they may be able to manipulate sunlight in quantum parcels to make their leaves more efficient.

In Africa baobab trees have been used as prisons and classrooms, sanctuaries and water reservoirs;

In Germany, early Christian missionaries cut down trees that had been sacred to the native pagans, as if afraid to let them live

Then I spake to the tree Were ye your own desire What is it ye would be? Answered the tree to me I am my own desire; I am what I would be.

ISAAC ROSENBERG

This modest tree has often been undervalued as a component of our woods; but I like to think that if it were ever in danger of disappearing, our poets would come to its rescue.

Graceful it may be, and hardy too, for birch is a colonizer of broken ground like railway embankments, or previously frozen lands, and was the first tree to arrive in Britain after the last Ice Age; but once its job of preparing the ground for other trees is done, it surrenders to them,

Howard Hughes’s notorious—and mis-named—Spruce Goose wooden flying boat was constructed. It flew just once, in 1947. At the time it was the largest aircraft ever built, bigger than a Jumbo jet.

Biologists are beginning to talk as if this is an example of ‘quantum’ biology: all very exciting and tantalizing.

obvious that there’s going to be some surplus oxygen.

where it may live for more than two-thousand years. It is one of the very few trees known to have survived as close as a mile from the atomic blast at Hiroshima in 1945. To say that ginkgos are tolerant of urban pollution is the ultimate understatement.