One of the cooler things about old trees is that the oldest ones tend to be puny, pathetic looking, twisted little individuals, because they grow very slowly an

One of the cooler things about old trees is that the oldest ones tend to be puny, pathetic looking, twisted little individuals, because they grow very slowly and are often weather-beaten. The slow growth is because they tend to be located in exposed areas that have little soil and therefore not much storage for water, which limits growth but also reduces risk from fires, fungus, and other pests that jump from tree to tree. They may also be at the treeline, where temperature is a limiting growth factor as well. One of the first papers to document this is a paper by E. Schulman of Caltech in 1957, called Longevity under Adversity in Conifers [0]. Since then, this has been confirmed extensively in many more environments and tree families than Schulman analyzed. The basics are that slower growth minimizes resource use as well as the attack surface to pests, so the organisms can subsist for thousands of years until they are killed by climate change, or more frequently, the ground eroding out beneath them. It's somewhat reminiscent of the stereotypical monk/lama/mystic living an ascetic life in a cave in the mountains high above the gluttonous cities. However, the basic ideas of finding a niche on the fringe, limiting risk exposure and resource use, and staying small for a long time are completely inappropriate to the tech community, of course. [0]: http://wmrc.edu/history/docs/science-1954.pdf http://wmrc.edu/history/docs/science-1954.pdf (edited for clarity)