Clare Snow’s Reviews > Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees > Status Update

'The more we know of the [paleo] climate and vegetation,' said a state geologist, 'the better we'll be able to assess the oil and gas potential there.'

🙄

"Now and then, the North Pole wanders and, for years or centuries, makes off to Antarctica."

WTF

"There's no globalized aesthetic for not-quite-millenial subdominant medium-sized growers."

"I've never met a landowner who wasn't excited to learn they had a tree older than American democracy." - dendrochronologist Dave Stahle from the University of Arkansas' Ancient Cross Timbers Consortium

"Trees keep on living in place - until something happens, as something will, sooner or later, or later still."

"What would it signal about the planet if its oldest trees died? The postwar history of Schulman's over-overage conifers is the history of ancient trees in modern times, concentrated and accelerated."

"Visitors to Schulman Memorial Grove want to see the oldest living thing known to science, four and one-half millennia old, knowing ahead of time they won't know when they've seen it. Their walk past the tree is an act of agnostic faith."

(Signage had to be removed due to people vandalizing the tree)

Among Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains, "temperature, not CO2, is the controlling factor, and that this recent growth spurt - confined to the upper tree line - has no precedent in nearly four thousand years."

This is depressing

"Proverbial tree time could be adapted for the present unperfect, when the planet that has been is being undone."