a different grip on reality

How trees changed the world

"I WAS completely dumbfounded," says palaeontologist Bill Stein, recalling the moment he first set eyes on the newly discovered fossil. In front of him was an astonishingly well preserved tree, complete with trunk and branches, dating from 385 million years ago. Finding a near-complete fossil tree is rare enough in itself, but this was even more extraordinary. It came from the first forest on Earth.

The long-hoped-for Gilboa tree dates from the middle of the Devonian period (416 to 359 million years ago), a time of explosive evolutionary action among land plants. During this period they evolved from small, primitive forms that would have barely brushed your ankle into genuine trees up to 30 metres tall. And with the evolution of trees, they and all the other plants - hitherto confined to marshy environments - went on to conquer the surface of the planet.

These first forests changed the face of the Earth. Early land plants had already started leaking oxygen into the atmosphere, creating soils and providing food and shelter for animals, and the evolution of trees upped the pace of change. They weathered rocks, made soils deeper and richer, created complex habitats and changed the climate beyond recognition. By the end of the Devonian, an ecologically modern world had appeared.

The best place to catch a glimpse of this primitive terrestrial Eden is in the rolling hills around the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, UK. Here the finely crystallised quartz of the Rhynie chert preserves in extraordinary detail an entire ecosystem that was engulfed and petrified by silica-rich waters from a volcanic spring 410 million years ago. The fossil plants still stand upright, and even their cells remain visible. Tiny creatures such as insects, centipedes, mites, harvestmen and spider-like trigonotarbids are preserved in immaculate detail. Some still cling to the stems on which they lived and died.......

by James O'Donoghue 

For full article see

The Waste Land

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.  T.S. Eliot

Link to Kew Gardens Tree website 

Woods I once walked

Tim's dad used to live at the Barn house... these are the woods behind it, last seen two years ago...

Tree's Eye View

The advantages of staying still and watching the world change.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

29/3/09


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E.Houseman 1859-1936













24/4/09

Wer du auch seist: Am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
Wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los . .

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fallen words

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats 1795-1821

Symbiosis

Fall

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees

If I were to be reborn, I'd like to be a tree.
A poplar tree has about 45,000 genes compared to the human genome of about 25,000.
The tree form has evolved separately a number of times from unrelated classes of plants. The earliest forms were tree ferns, horsetails and lycophytes.
The oldest tree, an African Baobab, is probably 6,000 years old.
How does time pass for a tree? Or maybe it's a thought it can do without.
Perhaps Immanuel Kant is right when he says: from such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Do trees communicate? I suppose that depends on what you're listening for.
There's research published on the way that plants interrelate via the rhizosphere - see, for example How plants communicate using the underground information superhighway which gives evidence that complex, root multitude exudates play a role in root-root and root-microbe communication.
In a similar vein, scientists have discovered that bacteria talk to each other - see Bonnie Bassler's TED talk.
And from another point of view, Buddha attained enlightment after meditating under the Bodhi tree, then spent a whole week afterwards staring at it in gratitude.