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Trees (General; Miscellaneous)

rynner2

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County's new 'great' tree project

Cornwall has appointed its first Great Trees Officer to protect the county's ancient trees.

It is part of a three-year study to find and record "significant" trees with long and unusual histories.

The project is the work of the Cornwall Ancient Trees Forum, funded by groups including the National Trust and Heritage Lottery Fund.

A county-wide tree hunt, involving local people, will be launched later in the autumn.

Brian Muelaner, the National Trust's Ancient Tree Advisor, said: "There are very old trees and trees with cultural and religious significance.

"I know there are trees along the coast where World War Two soldiers, whiling away time before embarkation, carved their initials into the trunks.

"Cornwall has very strong Celtic roots, there are still trees next to natural springs which modern pagans decorate or 'dress'.

"And of course young lovers carving their names in 1850 or so and others following suit, so some trees are covered. It's part of our culture."

The new Great Tree Officer, Dr Loveday Jenkin, will work alongside local parish groups to make an inventory of Cornish trees.

They also hope to form a network of tree wardens across the county.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7626716.stm
 
Another unique Shugborough feature:

Yew must be kidding: Amazing tree with a canopy the width of Royal Albert Hall goes into the record books
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 6:08 PM on 19th May 2009

A giant yew with a canopy the size of London's Royal Albert Hall has entered the record books as the widest tree in the UK.
The champion tree, which has engulfed a National Trust garden, has an amazing crown circumference of almost 200 yards.

Tree experts, who discovered the 350-year-old Yew as part of the Woodland Trust's ancient tree hunt, believe it may even be the widest in Europe.

The branches of tree, in the grounds of Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire, spread out a massive 50 metres wider than its nearest rival.
It has now been recorded in the Tree Register of the British Isles (TROBI) as the largest spreading crown of any tree in Britain and Ireland.

'This remarkable tree has spent most of its life growing naturally sideways rather than upwards,' said David Alderman, from TROBI.

The tree has a canopy the size of London's Royal Albert Hall
'Many of its branches have rooted themselves, providing even more vigour as it has engulfed other trees originally planted 25 metres away.

'As yew can live for 1,000 years or more, if left unchecked, this tree could potentially keep growing ever wider and eventually cover the whole estate!'
Other UK contenders for the title include a layering Horse chestnut at Settrington House, North Yorkshire, with a circumference of 120 metres.

The tree with the widest unsupported spreading branches, that are not touching the ground or layering, is the King Oak at Charleville, Co. Offaly in Ireland, which at its widest point has a single branch reaching almost 30 metres.

The enormous Shugborough yew would have measured even bigger but has just been clipped back by head gardener Joe Hawkins as it was taking over the entire garden.

'The tree is extremely impressive,' said Fiona Moss, from The Woodland Trust.

'It's extraordinary to look at and so huge it's just like something out of the rainforest.'

The yew tree dates to around 1659 - the year after Oliver Cromwell died and half a century before the current Shugborough Hall was built. It is likely to have sprung up in the grounds a small medieval manor house.
The Hall was built in the 18th century and went on to become home of the Earl of Lichfield. The estate is also famous for the Shepherd's Monument which contains a mysterious code carved in the 18th century. Some people believe the code reveals the hiding place of the Holy Grail.

...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... books.html
 
Trees Survived Ice Age Chill in Scandinavia
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
by Michael Balter on 1 March 2012, 2:00 PM | 0 Comments

Survivor. Ancient DNA evidence shows that the Norway spruce tree, Picea abies, and other conifers lived in Scandinavia during the last ice age.
Credit: Wikipedia

The last ice age hit northern Europe hard. At its height, about 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, glaciers up to 3000 meters thick covered some 6 million square kilometers of Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and western Russia. It's hard to believe that any trees could survive this onslaught, and most scientists assumed that Scandinavia in particular was treeless until it thawed out about 9000 years ago. Now analysis of ancient DNA has found evidence that conifer trees like pine and spruce were alive and well in Norway as early as 20,000 years ago. The findings suggest that trees may migrate slower than thought when faced with climate warming, which could have important implications for models predicting the effects of current global warming.

Researchers have traditionally relied upon indicators such as fossil pollen from lake sediments to map the extent of trees and other vegetation in ancient times. But some scientists have argued that these methods don't provide the full picture because trees don't always produce pollen when they are at the edge of their range and their survival is challenged.

Back in 2002, for example, physical geographer Leif Kullman of Umeå University in Sweden radiocarbon dated fossilized pieces of the trunks, roots, and cones of spruce, pine, and birch in Sweden's Scandes Mountains to as early as 14,000 years ago, when ice sheets still covered Scandinavia. But some other researchers argued that the samples might have been contaminated.

To try to resolve the issue, a team led by Eske Willerslev, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed lake sediments and pollen from the Trøndelag region in central Norway and lake sediments from Andøya Island in the country's north. As the team reports in this week's issue of Science, it was able to recover spruce mitochondrial DNA at Trøndelag in sediments dated as early as 10,300 years ago. And in sediments from Andøya Island, Willerslev and his colleagues found spruce chloroplast DNA dated to 17,700 years ago and pine chloroplast DNA dated to about 22,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age. The team considered the possibility that young DNA might have contaminated older sediments but rejected it because lake sediments generally immobilize organic compounds in place.

The team concludes that the trees probably survived in small "ice-free refugia," known to have existed in western Scandinavia. The results confirm earlier suggestions that trees and other vegetation "did not need to migrate south during a glacial period in order to survive, as previously thought," Willerslev says.

The researchers also argue that their results have implications for modeling how vegetation will respond to global warming. Such models are based largely on reconstructions of past plant distributions, and many modelers have assumed that conifers spread quickly into Scandinavia after the ice sheets retreated about 9000 years ago. "Current models suggesting that conifer forests spread very fast" after a warming episode "may also be wrong," Willerslev says. It looked like trees spread quickly because they were already there, he says.

Kullman, who was not involved in the current work, says he finds the results "not entirely surprising," adding that they challenge "orthodox interpretations" resulting from pollen analysis. And Thompson Webb, a paleoclimatologist at Brown University, says that it is "astounding" that conifers were able to survive as far north as Norway during the height of the ice age. He calls the study "impressive, ... one of those surprising phenomena from the past that was waiting to be discovered."
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
 
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TOP TREE

ENGLAND: An oak said to have sheltered Robin Hood and his merry men, and a yew which spans an area the size of the Royal Albert Hall, are two of the finalists in the Tree of the Year competition, the BBC reports.

Run by nature charity Woodland Trust, the contest’s winner will be pitted against trees from other countries in an international competition next year. The finalists include seven oaks, two yews and an apple tree.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/quir ... 94203.html
 
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'Oldest tree' at West Cornwall National Trust garden topples to the ground
By CMCherie | Posted: December 22, 2014
9232133-large.jpg

Head gardener at Trengwainton Phil Griffiths stands on top of a 300-year-old Beech tree which recently came down in the gardens.

ONE of the oldest trees on a West Cornwall estate has come crashing to the ground.
For 300 years, the Beech tree stood on grand display at the entrance to the Terrace at Trengwainton National Trust gardens.
But after being hit by a deadly fungus, it was toppled by winds.
“It was one of the oldest, if not the oldest on the estate,” said Phil Griffiths, head gardener at the Heamoor estate.
“And there was a small gust of wind and the tree went.”

In September, workers at the picturesque venue spotted a small amount of Meripilus Giganteus fungus growing on the Beech.
As part of the inspection process, tree surgeons were called in and Trust staff told the Beech was fine and should just be monitored.
But just a short time later it toppled to the ground.
“Even now it is down, the crown of the Beech is still full of life,” said Mr Griffiths who added that all of the mature trees on the estate are regularly inspected as part of ongoing maintenance of the site.
“But there is hardly any root left.”

The green-fingered gardener added that it would cost around £5,000 to clear and replant the area as well as dispose of the tree. But there are plans to help the centuries old Beech live on.
“We have been in touch with local wood turners and we plan to turn smaller bits of the wood into souvenirs with the main part of the tree set to be used in other projects around Trengwainton.”

http://www.cornishman.co.uk/Oldest-tree-West-Cornwall-National-Trust-garden/story-25750813-detail/story.html#ixzz3McuhoP3C
 
The 392-Year-Old Bonsai That Survived Hiroshima
sep28x28.png

bonsaiheader2.png


IMAGE CREDIT: CLIFF VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS // CC BY-SA 2.0

Hiding in the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. is a compact little piece of Japanese history. In 1976, as a gift from Japan for America’s bicentennial, bonsai master Masaru Yamaki donated a bonsai tree first planted in the 17th century. And it’s still there, housed at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum.

The Japanese white pine, currently 392 years old, is the oldest tree in the collection. It was planted in 1625, and has probably been "in training"—its growth guided by different bonsai masters—since it was around 3 to 5 years old. Bonsai are delicate trees that require a master’s care, but this one has been through a lot, though the National Bonsai Museum didn't know that when it arrived.

In 2001, Yamaki's son and grandson visited the museum to see their relative's tree, and in the process, revealed its unusual history to the bonsai curator there: When the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, it exploded less than two miles away from the Yamaki home, where the bonsai was kept on a garden bench. The family—and the tree—survived. So did the other bonsai trees that were kept in the garden, placed under a tall wall.

The fortunate Yamaki tree, which is a rare specimen from the island of Miyajima, is not the oldest bonsai in the world, though. Tokyo’s Imperial Palace is home to both a 450-year-old tree and a 550-year-old one.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/91799/392-year-old-bonsai-survived-hiroshima
 
An interesting Oak tree...
Rare oak hybrid takes root at Penryn Campus

A rare variety of oak tree is the newest addition to the gardens at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus.
The special sapling was planted at a ceremony led by Professor Dave Hosken, the dean of strategic development for Cornwall. The tree, a gift from the University’s Streatham Campus in Exeter, has strong links to the Devon city - William Lucombe gave his name to the Lucombe Oak (Quercus lucombeana) having developed the hybrid from the Cork Oak and Turkey Oak in his Exeter nursery in 1762.

It is said that Lucombe was so impressed with the timber, that when he felled the original hybrid in 1785, he kept planks from it under his bed with the intention of using them to make his coffin. But Lucombe lived an exceptionally long life, dying at the age of 102, by which time the planks had unfortunately decayed in the Devon damp.

The Lucombe Oak will now add to the rich horticultural diversity found at the Penryn Campus and will be expertly tended to by the award-winning grounds team, led by head gardener, Toby Nenning. He said: “The new oak tree is quite special and has been planted between the two old oaks that formed the original hedgerow boundary seen on old maps.”
...

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/15269794.Rare_oak_hybrid_takes_root_at_Penryn_Campus/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lucombe
 
No more Norwegian Wood?

Tree loss pushing beetles to the brink
By Helen Briggs BBC News
  • 3 hours ago

_100268379_iphthiminusitalicus-assessedasendangered.hervbouyon_preview.jpg
Image copyrightHERVE BOUYON
Image captionThis endangered beetle is found under dead branches
The loss of trees across Europe is pushing beetles to the brink of extinction, according to a new report.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature assessed the status of 700 European beetles that live in old and hollowed wood.

Almost a fifth (18%) are at risk of extinction due to the decline of ancient trees, the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles report found.

This puts them among the most threatened insect groups in Europe.

Saproxylic beetles play a role in natural processes, such as decomposition and the recycling of nutrients.

They also provide an important food source for birds and mammals and some are involved in pollination.

"Some beetle species require old trees that need hundreds of years to grow, so conservation efforts need to focus on long-term strategies to protect old trees across different landscapes in Europe, to ensure that the vital ecosystem services provided by these beetles continue," said Jane Smart, director of the IUCN Global Species Programme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43262254#
 
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Here's a weird tree-based story we missed:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattl...than-100-old-growth-trees-near-lake-quinault/

Over 100 trees uprooted in mild weather in Washington. The FT says there's no explanation, but that news link offers one. How convincing it is I don't know, but I suppose that's why they call it a freak gust of wind. 100 trees, though!

I mean, Washington is Wendigo country, isn't it?

Just noticed this trees thread is in Culture for some reason. Not sure where would be a more appropriate place.
 
Answer in the FT 368 Letters page as to what happened in Washington, it's a bit complicated, but basically an explicable freak wind caused it, and there were similar, if rare, cases before. So anomalous, but not impossible.
 
Another tree mystery pops up in the same issue: can't find an online translation for this, but basically in Tutzing, Bavaria, in March this year a plot of trees belonging to the Church of St Joseph had some of their number stolen, but it was "not a professional job" as the trees had been sawn off at a height of one metre or more. No, it didn't happen for Christmas. Maybe an amateur lumberjack trying out his skills? Not a freak wind, presumably.
 
The 392-Year-Old Bonsai That Survived Hiroshima
sep28x28.png

bonsaiheader2.png


IMAGE CREDIT: CLIFF VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS // CC BY-SA 2.0

Hiding in the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. is a compact little piece of Japanese history. In 1976, as a gift from Japan for America’s bicentennial, bonsai master Masaru Yamaki donated a bonsai tree first planted in the 17th century. And it’s still there, housed at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum.

The Japanese white pine, currently 392 years old, is the oldest tree in the collection. It was planted in 1625, and has probably been "in training"—its growth guided by different bonsai masters—since it was around 3 to 5 years old. Bonsai are delicate trees that require a master’s care, but this one has been through a lot, though the National Bonsai Museum didn't know that when it arrived.

In 2001, Yamaki's son and grandson visited the museum to see their relative's tree, and in the process, revealed its unusual history to the bonsai curator there: When the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, it exploded less than two miles away from the Yamaki home, where the bonsai was kept on a garden bench. The family—and the tree—survived. So did the other bonsai trees that were kept in the garden, placed under a tall wall.

The fortunate Yamaki tree, which is a rare specimen from the island of Miyajima, is not the oldest bonsai in the world, though. Tokyo’s Imperial Palace is home to both a 450-year-old tree and a 550-year-old one.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/91799/392-year-old-bonsai-survived-hiroshima

Strangely (or not) the tree shape reminds me of a mushroom cloud.
 
Cornwall has appointed its first Great Trees Officer to protect the county's ancient trees.
They definitely have schemes like that in Vietnam, a village I was staying in had a tree all decorated with plaques and flags. Google translate helped me understand that the tree was historical and in some way important.

Edit: Hong Kong also has. I used to go to work near one of the government-registered 'old and valuable trees' and it was terrific, really tall.
 
The old Hakka village of Lai Chi Wo (Lai Chi as in 'lychee') in the northern New Territories of Hong Kong also seems to have some interesting trees.

From Wikipedia:

Five-finger Camphor (Cinnamomum Camphora)[edit]
The Camphor measures 25 metres tall and 3 metres in diameter. It gets its name because it had five branches like five fingers, although only four of them remain today. It was said that during Japanese Occupation, when Lai Chi Wo was occupied as a military backup base for the Japanese Army, the Japanese cut down many trees for fear that their enemies will hide near the area and make sudden attacks. When the soldiers threatened to chop this five-finger Camphor, the villagers stood up to protected the tree with their lives. Therefore, only one of the "fingers" has been cut.

The Hollow Tree (Autumn Maple)[edit]
The Hollow Tree is a more than one-hundred-year-old maple. It reaches a 21-metre high and 1.7-metre in diameter. It is called "hollow tree" because it has a huge hole inside the tree. The hole has openings in both upper and lower section of the tree. It is once said that there was a honeycomb and villagers tried to fire the comb but finally fired the tree altogether. However, the explanations from the description board of the tree told another cause. The parenchya cells in the centre of the trunk contracted and withered as a result of infection. Small holes began to appear inside the tree. However, the nutrients and moisture transporting cells around the exterior part of the trunk continued to grow and thicken. The trunk later get thicker, and the centre hollow expanded in tandem.

It is also the site of a deliberately-planted 'Feng Shui Woodland', which sounds very interesting in its own right.

I'm keen to visit when I next have a free day.
 
I don't know how old the Bucks/Herts county border is (1,000 years at least ?), but where it crossed one of my father's field there were only three Boundary Oaks left. Years back one of these oaks had finally succumbed to a gale and I helped clear up the debris. My father then transplanted a nearby oak sapling into the hollow stump of the parent tree. That was how it should be.
By 1985 a portion of a neighbouring Parish found itself cut off from its main body by the completion of the North Orbital Ring Road (M25). Voting to join our Parish, we had to Beat the Bounds to re-define the new boundary, the first change in 600 years. Following the Parish Recorder with the map, we couldn't find a suitable line of trees on the Western edge to mark a border - but there was a line of Telegraph poles. That's what became the official boundary.
 
18th century tree huggers

Tree huggers — September, 1730 — When the maharajah of Marwar wanted cement for a new palace, he sent woodsmen into the forest to harvest khejri trees (Prosopis cineraria). But the villagers who lived in the khejri forest held the trees to be sacred, according to the teachings of Guru Jambheshwar. One villager, Amrita Devi, wrapped her arms around a tree. The woodsmen said they would take a bribe to spare her life, but she said she would rather sacrifice her life to save the trees. Sar santey rukh rahe to bhi sasto jaan” she said; If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it is worth it.” So the woodsmen killed her, along with her three daughters Asu, Ratni and Bhagubai. When the other Bishnoi villages heard about the incident, each of the 83 villages sent a representative to also hug the trees and defy the maharajah. Many were also killed, and the rest were mocked by the leader of the woodsmen, who said the villages were sending old people who no longer useful. In response, young men, women and children also began hugging the trees. Altogether, 294 men and 69 women of the Bishnoi branch of the Hindu faith were killed in the incidents. The maharajah was appalled, and decreed that the khejri trees would forever be protected.
The Bishnois inspired the modern Van Mahotsav tree-planting movement (begun in 1950) and the Chipko environmental movement to preserve Himalayan forests (begun in 1973).
Tree huggers 2: To this day, Bishnoi villages are wooded oases in the otherwise harsh Rajasthan desert, where wildlife congregates in proximity to the people. The Thar region of Pakistan is adjacent to the Rajasthan desert of India. Although the Thari people are now mostly Islamic, their traditional teachings about the sanctity of life somewhat resemble those of the Bishnoi. The Sindh desert is farther west in Pakistan. The Sindhi people, related to the Thari, have similar beliefs, but are now culturally divided: Sindhis who practice Hinduism long ago migrated into the Mumbai region of India, while those who practice Islam remain in Pakistan. (Note: The date of this event has been given as 1778 (Clifton), 1720 (Guha), 1737 (Prasad), 1750 (Gottlieb) and 1730 (Wikipedia, Bishnoi samaj)

http://environmentalhistory.org/enlightenment/early-enlightenment-1700-50/
 
An interesting tree.

Almost 30 years ago, the specimen of a weird tree collected in the southern part of Kakadu National Park was packed in my luggage. It was on its way to the mecca of botanical knowledge in London, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. But what was it?

With unusual inflated winged fruits, it flummoxed local botanists who had not seen anything like it before. To crack the tree's identity, it needed more than the limited resources of the Darwin Herbarium. Later, we discovered a fragmentary specimen hidden in a small box at the end of a little-visited collection vault in the Darwin Herbarium. And it had been sitting there quietly since 1974. Most of the specimens inside this box just irritate botanists as being somewhat intractable to identify. It's known as the "GOK" box, standing for "God Only Knows".

Together with the resources of Kew Gardens, the species was finally connected with a genus and recognised as a new species. A year later, it was named Hildegardia australiensis.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-bizarrely-verging-extinction-mystic-tree.html
 
Trees get masting mania, lierally go nuts.

Stroll the sidewalks of the eastern United States this fall and you might think you’re walking on ball bearings, as a bumper crop of acorns rolls under your feet.

Pine and spruce drip with cones, and rafts of maple seeds twirl toward the ground. This is a mast year, in which tree species reproduce prolifically and in sync, creating a bounty that will reverberate through the ecosystem for years.

The phenomenon mystifies and awes ecologists. “It seems like a superorganism that covers the entire continent that takes a big breath every couple of years,” says Michał Bogdziewicz, a forest ecologist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland.

Now, they are exploring a once-ignored idea about its trigger: that masting occurs in years when seeds are likely to have favorable weather for sprouting the next spring or even in the next year or two. It’s not that trees have crystal balls. Instead, researchers suggest trees are alert to large-scale, long-term climate patterns, which can cause, for example, wet weather one month and dry weather months or a year later.

The basic idea dates back decades, but until recently, scientists have had little luck correlating major climate oscillations with masting. Now, inspired by the potential of a large database that will be published early next year, a group of researchers has explored this idea, called the environmental prediction hypothesis, in several papers appearing in the 1 December issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. If climate swings are as important as this hypothesis suggests, “we could have the basis for a large-scale ‘pacemaker’ of global forest ecosystem dynamics,” says plant ecologist Andrew Hacket-Pain of the University of Liverpool, lead developer of the database. “This would be a tremendously exciting result, and we now have the data in place to test it.” ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...o-many-nuts-climate-may-drive-erratic-masting
 
Trees get masting mania, lierally go nuts.

Stroll the sidewalks of the eastern United States this fall and you might think you’re walking on ball bearings, as a bumper crop of acorns rolls under your feet.

Pine and spruce drip with cones, and rafts of maple seeds twirl toward the ground. This is a mast year, in which tree species reproduce prolifically and in sync, creating a bounty that will reverberate through the ecosystem for years.

The phenomenon mystifies and awes ecologists. “It seems like a superorganism that covers the entire continent that takes a big breath every couple of years,” says Michał Bogdziewicz, a forest ecologist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland.

Now, they are exploring a once-ignored idea about its trigger: that masting occurs in years when seeds are likely to have favorable weather for sprouting the next spring or even in the next year or two. It’s not that trees have crystal balls. Instead, researchers suggest trees are alert to large-scale, long-term climate patterns, which can cause, for example, wet weather one month and dry weather months or a year later.

The basic idea dates back decades, but until recently, scientists have had little luck correlating major climate oscillations with masting. Now, inspired by the potential of a large database that will be published early next year, a group of researchers has explored this idea, called the environmental prediction hypothesis, in several papers appearing in the 1 December issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. If climate swings are as important as this hypothesis suggests, “we could have the basis for a large-scale ‘pacemaker’ of global forest ecosystem dynamics,” says plant ecologist Andrew Hacket-Pain of the University of Liverpool, lead developer of the database. “This would be a tremendously exciting result, and we now have the data in place to test it.” ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...o-many-nuts-climate-may-drive-erratic-masting
I have no science to back up this observation but in my 40-something year career as a landscape architect I’ve noted that trees under stress, if capable, seem to put their final burst of energy into reproduction. I‘ve often seen dying trees covered in seeds/cones while it’s companions look normal. Kind of bittersweet to witness in an anthropomorphic way.
 
I have no science to back up this observation but in my 40-something year career as a landscape architect I’ve noted that trees under stress, if capable, seem to put their final burst of energy into reproduction. I‘ve often seen dying trees covered in seeds/cones while it’s companions look normal. Kind of bittersweet to witness in an anthropomorphic way.
This is hilarious, because this isn't the first time I've heard of this!
I follow botanyshitposts on Tumblr and they once referred to this behavior (as witnessed in, I think, isoete fossils which appear to have also tried to put forth their reproductive efforts at the last) as, forgive me: "fear nutting". And this became a topic of discussion with them and some other botany type peoples, so now they have had to get credited (or, website URL credit, for the reference) in Proper Academia as botanyshitposts...
...and I think they were pretty impressed/mortified that their term might be one that sticks, even if in a casual manner.
 

‘Tree of life’ keeps forests alive for thousands of years, scientists discover


A rare breed of ancient trees appears to be the key to life for forests all over the world. Researchers at The Morton Arboretum say in many forests which date back centuries, there are a small number of trees which provide genetic and evolutionary benefits to the rest of the environment. Moreover, this “tree of life” is usually 10 to 20 times older than the average plant species dwelling in that forest!

th-620321004.jpeg


Study authors say the ancient trees radically change the genetic diversity and health of the surrounding trees which arrive later on. All of this keeps forests from dying out, while thriving for thousands of years.

Study authors found that these ancient trees don’t follow a natural (and predictable) life cycle like other plants, trees, and even humans. They also only make up fewer than one percent of the trees in the environment.

Despite their extreme age, the study finds they’ve survived countless environmental changes. This has allowed the trees to pass on their genetic resilience to the rest of the forest-dwelling organisms which sprout up around them.

https://www.studyfinds.org/tree-of-life-keeps-forests-alive/

maximus otter
 
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Sometimes, in my professional life, I feel like an ancient tree surrounded by my less venerable and reckless saplings. Then I have a nap and forget about it.
 
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