Reading: The Power of Trees

notes

Before the holiday I read a small book: The Power of Trees, written by Gretchen C. Daily with photographs by Charles J. Katz Jr. I picked up a number of small facts from it — the limits on how tall a tree can grow, for one. The one I found most interesting concerns the largest living organism on Earth: Pando.

The largest such stand sits in Fishlake National Forest, in south-central Utah. Pando is a grove of aspen — Populus tremuloides. What makes it remarkable is that every tree is male, and the entire grove grew from a single tree. Besides propagating by seed, this aspen can also sprout from the parent root system. The Pando grove at Fish Lake covers more than forty hectares and weighs over sixty thousand tonnes, all of it joined into one by the root system underground — which makes it, arguably, the largest living thing in the world.

Reference: Sohu