Suzanne Simard talks about “mother trees” and the plant-fungal network

Good interview with one of the major researchers in the field of plant-fungi interaction. Video by Dan McKinney via the University of British Columbia on Blip.tv.

It kind of surprises me that tree communication is still news to people — witness the breathless post in Treehugger — but I guess it takes years for radical new ideas to get out there. The bit about dying trees transferring information to living trees before they die was new to me, though. And I like Dr. Simard’s use of evocative language throughout. “Mother trees” — absolutely, why not?

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The New Sylva

Authors Gabriel Hemery and Sarah Simblet have a blog following the progress of their work in progress, The New Sylva. This aims to be an updated version of John Evelyn‘s famous work seventeenth century survey of British trees Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber :

Three hundred and fifty years after Evelyn first published his tour de force, we again realise that there is an important if not unprecedented role for trees, forests and timber in our lives, and with this, an imperative need to refresh our view. As society continues to experience increasing environmental change, trees will become more valued and needed, not only as beautiful plants shaping our landscapes and city parks, affirming our sense of place and heritage, but also as our most green renewable resource, and one of our most important environmental protectors. Trees provide carbon-lean products for construction, heat and energy, while at the same time they can control flooding, soil erosion, and reduce the destructive power of winds. Woodlands help to maintain the quality of our drinking water, provide habitat for wildlife, and play a crucial role in helping biodiversity adapt to climate change.

The New Sylva will bring the essence of John Evelyn’s most celebrated work to a new readership. It will integrate sensitively parts of his original, visionary and very beautiful prose, with a much-needed contemporary review. It will deliver authoritative scholarship in a style that is brief, clear, accessible, and pleasurable to read, and for the very first time, it will be copiously illustrated. The New Sylva will celebrate mankind’s relationship with trees through a creative integration of history, science and art.

One of their blog’s recent posts shows a time lapse film of one of the illustrations in progress – six hours of work reduced to two concentrated minutes!

A perfect day among urban trees

Philly Trees:

Have you ever seen a photo of a newborn mammal? The way the light shines through the pink flesh, through the transparent eyelids and through the doughy snouts, a field of stars shining through every new finger and toe?

It shines through the new leaves in the same way.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the leaves…

Guerrilla Grafters make San Francisco’s trees bear fruit

Via Katie Scott’s blog at Wired.co.uk. (Watch on YouTube.) As Katie puts it,

We have guerrilla gardeners here in London, but a group in San Francisco has taken the concept and made it more, well, fruitful.

The Guerrilla Grafters are on a mission to “undo civilisation one branch at a time” by grafting fruit bearing branches onto the non-fruit bearing fruit trees that line their city streets. The ultimate aim is “to turn city streets into food forests”.

The team has created a web app to help the city’s citizens find “graftable” trees, and offer instructions as to how to help the new branch take. The Guerrilla Grafters themselves are keeping tabs on how the grafts are doing; and whether the trees have borne any fruit.

Unfortunately, their website appears to be down at the moment.

The Money Tree

A fascinating art installation/psychological experiment filmed with a flip camera in Chicago by Amy Krouse Rosenthal on YouTube. Thanks to Árvores Inspiram Vida (the latest addition to our blogroll) for the link.

It’s amazing to me how many people simply fail to notice the money.