6 ms·
Some Unusual Trees
- hermitcrab 6mo agoThe UK has quite a few ancient yew trees. Some may be over 2000 years old. Often they are in church grounds (because ones that weren't got cut down to make long bows perhaps?). https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2025/08/ancient-yew-trees/ https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2025/08/ancient-yew-tr...
- madaxe_again 6mo agoOne of the many nice things about nature is that almost everything is interesting and unique in some particular way, be it longevity, size, or far more specific traits, across all species, all domains of natural science.
- CRConrad 6mo agoFunny thing is, that goes for the social sciences too, IMO. All a matter of having an open and curious mind, I suppose.
- Paul_Clayton 6mo agoThe PhD Movie introed with Richard Feinman's statement "I don't know anything, but I do know everything is interesting, if you go into it deeply enough." Feinman was a curious character. I suspect that with even a modest breadth of knowlegde a deep investigation of anything brings associations with existing knowledge (interest), unexpected connections and exceptions.
- nvalis 6mo agoRelated and also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_trees
- sheept 6mo agoOn mobile, this website seems to prevent you from pinch zooming in, which makes it slightly inconvenient to quickly zoom into the photos of the trees.
- mbeex 6mo agoCan do it on Ironfox Android (quite a forbidding browser) without problems. Not even JavaScript is allowed here.
- philipov 6mo agoIt's to help you learn to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away.
- orthoxerox 6mo agoNumber thirty-three: the larch. The larch.
- volemo 6mo agoWasn't sure which kind of trees to expect. :D
- woadwarrior01 6mo agoI was expecting something closer to Van Emde Boas trees. :D
- speed_spread 6mo agoIt's Red-Black Maple Syrup season!
- jditu 6mo ago[dead]
- smusamashah 6mo agoThe traveller tree looked the most interesting, like a peacock's feather. https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travelers-palm https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travel...
- pvaldes 6mo agoBig herb. Not really a woody plant.
- simquat 6mo agoIn Calabria — the very south of Italy — there this[0] 1000-years-old plane tree. [0]https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platano_di_Vrisi https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platano_di_Vrisi
- cluckindan 6mo agoRelated: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/ https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
- tomaskafka 6mo agoThank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details? See also category theory vs prototype theory.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoIt's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose. You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
- disqard 6mo agoIndeed, one of the epistemological lessons for me when confronting the power of LLMs is that a sort of "intellectual capability" can emerge in any system, from sheer scale/complexity alone. If you're interested, check out Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Conscious.pdf https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc...
- j16sdiz 6mo agoIt's the same people complaining tomato is fruit, so it must not be a vegetable.
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- Mistletoe 6mo agoI like to imagine aliens visiting earth and walking straight past us and communing with Pando. > Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.
- speed_spread 6mo agoThat would make as much sense as trying to speak with Whales.
- danparsonson 6mo agoWhat's wrong with whales?
- CRConrad 6mo agoOr even worse, speak with Wales.
- curl-up 6mo agoHighly recommend a series on Lodoicea (aka Double coconut or Coco de mer) from the Weird Explorer yt channel: https://youtu.be/GqicsIDYmgU https://youtu.be/GqicsIDYmgU
- mykowebhn 6mo agoI would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
- bombcar 6mo agoAll I know about them is they're bad railroad ties, and they explode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI
- mykowebhn 6mo agoTrue. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties. In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold. While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate. (I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
- awesome_dude 6mo ago> While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate. Forgive my ignorance, but I had understood the density of the wood meaning that the trunks of the trees were less likely to burn in a forest fire (which eucalypts encourage by shedding large amounts of dry bark)
- mykowebhn 6mo agoI just learned about this. Thanks for pointing this out!
- philipov 6mo agoAnd now... No. 1: The Larch
- impish9208 6mo agoMonty Python?
- karussell 6mo agoI highly recommend this 12min video "Trees Are So Weird" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs
- Guestmodinfo 6mo agoThe trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
- estimator7292 6mo agoLet people enjoy things. You aren't contributing to the conversation, you're trying to shit on everyone else for finding something interesting.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- t-3 6mo agoPushing back against the subtle suggestion that only American and European viewpoints are normal is more an example of cleaning up shit than shitting on anybody.
- lokar 6mo agoGiven where the plurality of readers of this site live (SF Bay Area), the inclusion of the coast redwoods cuts against your argument.
- bombcar 6mo agoThis is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article). A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
- abound 6mo agoIn the age of LLMs, it wouldn't be hard to build a UI on top of a Wikipedia dump [1] that satisfied any particular idea of serendipitous flipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- hcs 6mo agoOr you can just hit the Random button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
- ValveFan6969 6mo ago[dead]
- gryzzly 6mo agoA while back I read this book "The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter" from Colin Tudge and I was blown away by the fact that Mangrove roots effectively breath with the rhythm of tide. As the water recedes, change in pressure and the air is drawn into the pores. As the water comes in, pressure pushes stale air out and seals the pores. Trees are beautiful.
- MeteorMarc 6mo agoAre you sure the Madagascar traveller's tree is not a camouflaged mobile network antenna?
- luxuryballs 6mo agothat monolith tree gives me engineering anxiety, you mean all 20,000 shade users are depending on that singleton tree?
- jvm___ 6mo agoSince we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
- addaon 6mo agoWouldn’t a tree without rings still reasonably capture the atmospheric C13:C12 ratio as it grows? Or is the carbon motility within the trunk too high, or the ratio differences too small, to sample a bit near the core and use the ratio there as an age indicator?
- CRConrad 6mo agoCould be (I have no idea), but it sounds like that would be possible to investigate only by complicated laboratory tests. Not a visible change that makes it easy to calculate age by just sawing up a cross section and counting visible rings.
- imrozim 6mo ago[dead]
- marcosdumay 6mo agoTrees that grow in areas with wet/dry cycles also have rings. And since most of the trees from permanently-wet areas also have some kind of annual or semi-annual cycle, I'd guess the ringless ones are a rare exception everywhere.
- pvaldes 6mo agoPalms and Bamboo are technically "very big weeds". They are more related with grasses than with pines and never have rings. Bananas are also just giant herbs. So Monocots don't have rings. Anything else that is a tree in a tropical forest has rings. It does not matter where they grow. The rings are smaller in slow growing species, and are different structurally in conifers, but this is all.
- ks2048 6mo agoI was in Brazil for the first time last year and was very impressed with the trees. Two examples right from downtown São Paulo, https://kenschutte.com/lima-to-rio-by-bus/images/trees.jpg https://kenschutte.com/lima-to-rio-by-bus/images/trees.jpg
- marcosdumay 6mo agoJust to point, but those are not native from Brazil. It's a popular decorative tree, but you won't find them on the wild.
- pvaldes 6mo agoThis is a Ficus tree. Is one of the common genus of trees also in the Brazilian rainforest. Some are native. Other not.
- kkylin 6mo agoOf course one reads a (nice) post like this and must add one's favorite not on the list. Here's mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouquieria_columnaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouquieria_columnaris
- bawolff 6mo agoThere is something fascinating about someone getting a copy of Encyclopedia Brititanica, reading about trees, and then going to Wikipedia for pictures and to fill out details.
- richard_chase 6mo agoI expected and wanted tree data structures.
- markstock 6mo agoThen you want Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures by Samet. Unless you already have it, then enjoy some pretty (organic) trees.
- buildsjets 6mo agoAs an unusual tree I’ve always liked the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. It was known only from fossil record and thought extinct until a small grove was found in a mountain valley in China in 1946. There was a wave of popularity and a bunch were planted worldwide, which are now mature and easy to find if you want to see one. They grow well and very quickly in cool to temperate climates. They have little tiny deciduous needle-leaves that don't need to be raked, and grow tall and symmetrical without spreading too wide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia_glyptostroboides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia_glyptostroboides I started 2 sprouts I bought by mail order, after one growing season they were nearly 3 feet tall. I got them mail order from Jonsteen Nursery, they have been specializing in various redwood saplings for many years. https://sequoiatrees.com/ https://sequoiatrees.com/
- andrenotgiant 6mo agoThere are lots of "mature" dawn redwood trees in Princeton NJ - particularly in a specific neighborhood built in the 50s. It makes sense now that the species was discovered in the 40s
- temp0826 6mo agoOne of my favorite trees is Couroupita guianensis, known by a few other names (ayahuma, cannonball tree). When mature the trunks grow some beautiful flowers that can cover the trunk (wiki link has a few good pics). Native to South America, it's a revered tree in Amazonian plant shamanism (all parts of the plant can be used medicinally; spiritually it is one of the big ones, an entire school of its own). It made its way to India in the 1800s where it holds a lot of renown and importance now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couroupita_guianensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couroupita_guianensis
- pvaldes 6mo agoSuperb flowers but very dangerous to stay under the cannonball tree.
- firefoxd 6mo agoI remember when a Century Plant just sprouted in my back yard. In the span of a month, it grew 8 meters. It looks very alien in the process. [0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/what-kind-of-plant-is-this-grew-least-8-meters-month-gyxEA7X https://imgur.com/gallery/what-kind-of-plant-is-this-grew-le...
- pvaldes 6mo agoThat was a flower bloom. Also not a tree.
- jareklupinski 6mo ago> but you know wood? You know when you hold something in your hand, and it’s made of wood, and you can tell that? Yeah, that thing. everyone should have a copy of Identifying Wood on their metal bookshelf
- rigonkulous 6mo agoAn unusual tree I remember fondly as a child, is in the Karri forests of south-western Australia[1] .. we'd driven through a wild and stormy afternoon to get to it, a friend of my mother had gotten permission and the cabin key, as it was closed to the public then - and so it was that we were climbing the slippery, seemingly fragile iron posts that ringed its trunk[2] all the way to the top to find ourselves cramped into a fire lookout cabin .. we camped overnight in tight sleeping bags with a cold can of baked beans and yesterdays toast for breakfast, and I will always remember the lissajous swing of the thing, carefully turning the resonance of the wind into a constant figure 8, around and around, sometimes in minute increments gradually widening and slowing .. but every now and then, a big fast sweep would happen on the wind, and the tree would translate it through an odd crack into a bigger leverage, and that sleep that was so close gets pushed just a bit beyond the conscious horizon as one wondered, literally, if the tree was finally going to fall .. after a hundred or so years .. but still, just a few hours later, all is calm, the bush is slowly thawing out, the relentless sun conquers the horizon, the iron rungs dry out, the trees leaves steam in the morning sunrise, this great behemoths strength feeling safer and safer as we take gravitys' step .. and we are just too soon back on the ground and off for some surf out at Yallingup or so .. A beautiful living thing which my perception of its rythmic swing has lived on with me for decades. Trees are lovely. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_diversicolor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_diversicolor [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_Tree
- nickvec 6mo agoFor those curious, the world's tallest known living tree is Hyperion in Redwood National Park at 381.3 feet (116.22 meters). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)