Treeless Squirrel - Plant trees, please

If you’re like me, you can’t read enough about trees (you may also shed like crazy, but that is a different blog post). In that case, check out my Squidoo lens. It’s packed with tons of links, quotes, book recommendations, and even a poll or two. C’mon, it’s Leap Day. What better reason do you need?

LINK: Plant trees, please. I need a place to call home. (Squidoo)

What came first, the tree or the acorn? The world’s first trees belonged to a group of early fern-like plants called Wattieza. Standing about 30 feet tall, they looked very similar to the palm tree. They first appeared 385 million years ago, preceding the dinosaurs by 140 million years. In fact, before the Wattieza there were no land creatures at all; the rise of the Wattieza removed carbon from the atmosphere, causing temperatures to drop and creating the environment needed to develop terrestrial animals and insects. Incidentally, one of those first animals was a giant squirrel, with massive tusks and a loin cloth, who constantly wrote down his thoughts about the Wattieza on stone tablets. True story!

LINK: World’s first tree reconstructed (MSNBC)
   

It’s the time of year to plant bare root trees, which are trees that are sold leafless, dormant and with its roots bare of soil. They are significantly less expensive and usually establish healthy root systems faster than trees that come in containers. The Victorville Daily Press has some good advice for choosing and planting a bare roots tree, while the Arbor Day Foundation provides detailed instructions.

LINKS

It’s bare-root planting time (Daily Press)

How to Plant A Bare-Root Tree (Arbor Day Foundation)

Michelangelo meets maples with arborsculpture, the art of growing and shaping trees into shapes. Check out this gallery of arbosculptures; I like the one with the bike, seems like a good way to protect it from bike thieves. Click here for instructions on how to grow your own chair. Wow, that’s a sentence I thought I would never get to type.

LINKS
Arborsculpture (Wohba)
How to Grow a Chair (Arborsmith)

Underwater forests, created when dams submerge forests under newly created lakes, represent the ultimate in sustainable logging. While conventional logging contributes to deforestation, erosion and increased CO2 emissions, already-dead underwater trees don’t give off CO2 when harvested or change the landscape in any way. No screaming chainsaws, no clear cutting, no heavy machinery destroying a living ecosystem. Best of all, underwater logging robots! C’mon, how cool is that?

LINK
Resevoir Logs (Wired)

Image via Popular Science

A Spanish opposition party is promising to plant 500 million trees over four years if elected next month. That’s about 11 trees for every resident, planted at a rate of 14,000 trees per hour, 24 hours a day, for four years straight. Which, to me, sounds like a totally reasonable campaign promise.

LINK
Spanish opposition party goes green with promise to plant 500 million trees (International Herald Tribune)

L.A. Land has a thoughtful post about the King Palm, the ubiquitous palm tree a squirrel thinks of when he dreams of moving to California for the winter instead of going through yet another year of hibernation. The King Palm is not native to Southern California. It is there because it was imported, yet it probably graces the cover of every other 25-cent postcard sold on Sunset Strip. Does any other tree quite represent a city like the King Palm does Los Angeles? An enquiring squirrel wants to know.

LINK
Tree of the Week (L.A. Land) 

Trees, like any other 3D object in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, are incredibly difficult to create. Thanks to the computer scientists at Stanford, now planting a virtual tree is as easy as planting a real tree. They have created a program called Dryad that lets users select from a hundred different attributes to design the perfect tree, thus making the virtual world a #00FF00-er, more beautiful place.

LINK
Stanford builds a better virtual world, one tree (or millions) at a time (Stanford News Service)  

 From WebUrbanist comes a collection of amazing tree houses from around the world. From functional to fanciful, it’s interesting to see the different shapes a house can take when freed from the tyranny of being on the ground.

LINK
10 Amazing Tree Houses from Around the World (WebUrbanist) 

When it comes to records, people have nothing on trees. In Argentina, scientists are using ancient Patagonian cypress trees to take a snapshot of temperatures over the last fie hundred years. The Patagonian cypress lives for 2,000 years, giving scientists a long-term perspective in the climate change debate. Human records, by contrast, only go back until 1856, when the British Meteorological Society began collecting data from around the world. Squirrel records, incidentally, only go back to last Wednesday, which is the last day I took the newspapers to the recycling center.

 LINK
Ancient trees give clues to climate change (Reuters) 

Image via Reuters