An ode to trees from The N.Y. Times

Opinion writer Olivia Judson wrote this piece online for The New York Times Tuesday, naming trees her ‘Life-form of the Month’ for April.

The intro of the column:

The garden outside my window is home to an enormous and beautiful tree. I gave it a hug the other day, but the trunk is so huge I could barely get my arms round a quarter of its girth. For now, the branches are bare of leaves, so you can see its form in all its majesty, a triumph of natural architecture. And if you half-close your eyes and dream a little, you can also see its roots, stretching deep beneath the grass, much as its branches and twigs stretch outwards towards the buildings and upwards towards the sky.

Trees figure in our mythologies and metaphors — the tree of life, the tree of knowledge — and we often imagine them to harbor spirits and sprites. They also figure in a big way in our reality: forests (still) cover about 30 percent of the planet’s land, and may make up as much as 80 percent of Earth’s biomass. That is, if you were to put all the organisms on the planet on a giant set of scales, trees would account for 80 percent of the total.

Better yet, trees harbor plenty of non-imaginary beings. Birds like starlings or blue tits nest in tree holes; others, like magpies and crows, build their nests high in the branches. Chimpanzees sleep in trees. A number of fungi — truffles, anyone? — associate with tree roots. Insects like wasps make houses (galls) in the leaves. And so on.

The entire column can be found at The New York Times opinion blog: Opinionator.

–Toshio Suzuki