Next month, the festival goes to the hills of Missouri for its 26th installment. Our host will be Beau of Fox Haven Journal, who writes,

Trees. Those amazing mostly green things we so take for granted. What would we do without them? They bring to the world clean air, strength, beauty, shade, biodiversity and even help supply our energy needs in winter. So much more than a simple list of course, but even so we usually just look at them, or through them. Lately we’re enjoying the shade from our trees as the summer heat sets in.

As always, blog posts, photosets, and webpages about trees are welcome, and they need not be submitted by the author. If you see something that seems appropriate (see the About page for guidance), send it in! And this time we have three different ways for you to do so: via our online submission form; via Beau’s Contact page; or by direct email to the host at foxhavenjournal [at] gmail [dot] com. Submit early and often. The deadline is July 29th.

Darwin’s Thinking Path (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

The 25th edition of the Festival of the Trees commemorates a very special event. As Tai Haku explains,

Today is the 150th anniversary of a monumentous occasion for nature lovers. On this day in 1858 the Linnaean Society of London published an Essay by British explorer-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace together with another Essay by one Charles Darwin and a letter by Darwin to Asa Gray, the American botanist. These publications unleashed upon the world the theory of natural selection and our understanding of how trees (and every other living species) came to be was changed forever. Very few living things persist that were breathing on that day 150 years ago. Perhaps a few giant tortoises, bowhead whales and deepwater sponges remain. Most of the living organisms alive that day and this day will be trees though.

In what is perhaps the most learned and scientific FOTT edition to date, Tai goes well beyond mere links to place each tree species in an historical, cultural, or ecological context. Go visit.

On July 1, the 25th Festival of the Trees will be held on an island somewhere in the Caribbean. No, we’re not trying to be coy — that’s how blogger Tai Haku of Earth, Wind & Water describes his location. Well, he also calls it a tropical paradise, but that’s pretty much par for the course, as we understand it.

Tai asked for an early deadline: June 27. So if you want to reserve a spot in this paradisiacal edition, you have just three weeks to send your tree-related links to p.taihaku [at] googlemail [dot] com or via the handy online submission form.

Festival #24 has arrived at Wrenaissance Reflections with links from some new-to-us blogs, such as Tree Stories, Romancing the Desert, Seeded Earth, and TGAW, as well as many long-time participants. Wren’s easy-to-read narrative takes account of the myriad ways in which trees contribute to human well-being. Sketches of rarities like the Virginia roundleaf birch and the dawn redwood mingle with appreciations for the ubiquitous silver maple and the hawthorns of Ireland. Go visit!

On June 1, the Festival of the Trees will have successfully weathered its first two years — knock on wood — and who better to host it than Wren of Wrenaissance Reflections? A long-time participant and stalwart supporter of the festival, she also hosted the first anniversary edition last year at her old blog.

For many parts of the northern hemisphere, the end of May coincides with the height of breeding bird activity, as well as the end of the flowering and beginning of the fruiting season for most trees. Practically every tree and shrub will have stories to tell. If you live elsewhere in the world, your accounts of arboreal doings will seem all the more wondrous to the rest of us. One way or another, please share! Email the permalink to your blog post or photo set by May 29 to jlblum [at] Wrenaissance [dot] com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line, or, as always, avail yourself of the handy online submission form.

Sexy maples, enormous magnolias, the world’s oldest living tree, the death of a baobab, specular displays of redbud — these are a few of the arboreal marvels on display in the latest edition of the Festival of the Trees, hosted at 10,000 Birds. Complex conservation issues take center stage in several of the linked posts. For example, what kind of street trees are the best for wildlife, and are they also the ones that sequester the most carbon dioxide? Should the National Arbor Day Foundation be distributing non-native trees? And how can we help restore the endangered Atlantic Forest of Brazil? Ponder these questions and more at Festival #23.

Mike of 10,000 Birds is the founder of I and the Bird, the bi-weekly blog carnival for birds and bird lovers and our chief inspiration when we founded the Festival of the Trees almost two years ago. So we’re very pleased and honored to announce that he’ll be hosting the next edition of the Festival on May 1. After all, what could be a more logical combination than birds and trees?

This won’t be a themed festival per se, though we do hope to increase participation among birders and other nature-lovers whose links and visits have made 10,000 Birds one of the most popular birding blogs on the web, and one of the top ten nature blogs overall. If you haven’t submitted to the Festival in recent months, this would be a good time to get outside, enjoy the spring or autumn weather, depending on which hemisphere you reside in, and gather material for the best tree-related post you can write. You can either email your permalinks to mike (at) 10000birds (dot) com, send them via the Contact page at 10,000 Birds, or submit them via our online submission form — whichever is most convenient. The deadline for submissions is April 29.

Our first bilingual edition — the first of many, we hope — is up at the Brazilian blog Árvores Vivas em Nossas Vidas. Those of us who can only read English may have had to wait an extra day (due to technical difficulties, not to Dave procrastinating, we swear!), but that’s O.K. It’s only fitting that Portuguese should have pride-of-place around here. Name another country more closely associated with trees and forests than the one that contains the bulk of the Amazon rainforest, which despite the depredations of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers, is still by far the largest and most biodiverse rainforest ecosystem in the world. (True, Lebanon actually has a tree on its flag… and if and when a Lebanese blogger volunteers to host an Arabic-English edition of the festival, we’ll say flattering things about his/her country, too.)

At any rate, Juliana put a lot of extra time and effort into assembling this edition, so please pay her a visit, and link from your own blog, as well.

The April edition of the Festival of the Trees will be our first to appear on a non-Anglophone blog. Árvores Vivas em Nossas Vidas is one of a growing number of Lusophone tree blogs, and Juliana promises a fully bilingual festival post. Send all tree-related links, regardless of language of origin, to arvoresvivas [at] gmail [dot] com by March 28, or use the online submission form.

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In other linguistically related tree-blogging news, the phenomenally popular LOLcats site I Can Has Cheezburger? recently featured its first LOLtree. The captioned image, which is of unknown origin, received 2,614 votes in the viewer-selection process that determines what appears on the blog. In the LOLcat argot, nom is onomatopoeia for the operation of jaws in eating, sometimes also used as a verb meaning “to consume.” We think.

Peg at Orchards Forever has laid out an orchard’s worth of links, text, and illustrations — go visit! History, folklore, science and conservation all get their due as Peg assembles a convincing case for the importance of fruit trees and orchards. This is our third themed edition of the FOTT, and was, I think you’ll agree, a resounding success.