The book About Trees, now being reprinted after selling out its first small run last year is, as the title says, about trees. Like other books, it's also printed on trees, in the form of paper. Unlike any other book, it's printed in Trees, an arboreal font in which each letter corresponds to a different type of towering plant.
Creator Katie Holten, an Irish artist, describes About Trees as a "recycling" of texts that, considered together, provoke much thought about the relationship between humans and nature. The 256-page book contains tree-themed works by prominent authors and other luminaries, from Plato to Radiohead, via Jules Verne, Charles Darwin, and Zadie Smith. The text of each piece appears in English alongside a Trees translation.
A line from Zadie Smith's novel NW, translated into Tree. (All images courtesy of Katie Holten)
In selecting the texts, Holten aimed for an eclectic yet cohesive mix incorporating fiction, philosophy, non-fiction, and academic writing. All the translations are confined to one page, meaning short works are transformed into orderly rows of trees, while longer works appear as dense forests.
For the Trees font, which was created especially for the book, Holten delved into her archive of New York City tree drawings, created 10 years earlier. "I wrote out the alphabet, A through Z, and then realized I could match a tree that had the same latter: A for apple, B for beech, C for cedar," she says. (V and X were a bit trickier, but Latin names came in handy.)
The numbers are represented as twigs, while the punctuation marks are shoots, leaves, and, in the case of the period, an acorn.
Having established a tree alphabet, Holten is now considering ways to write messages into the landscape. One way is to incorporate words, spelled out in trees, when planting a garden or reforesting a developed area.
She is currently in talks with Google's ecology team about a possible “typographic forest” installation at the company's California headquarters, which would involve developing a new alphabet tailored to the area's native flora.
The Tree translation of Liberty Trees, a story by Robert Sullivan.
Holten also has her eye on the forthcoming Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, which she believes would benefit greatly from a garden filled with hidden messages written in Tree.
In the meantime, anyone is welcome to use the existing tree alphabet to plant their own message. (If you don't have space or access to the requisite saplings, you can plant a virtual garden in a Word doc—the Trees font is free to download.)
This is not your average tree climbing. Sure, technical tree-climbing and urban arborists are pretty legit, but speed-wise they're no match for climbers sprinting up an 80-foot pole in a matter of seconds.
This video is from the 2013 Squamish Days Loggers Sports Festival, in Squamish, British Columbia, and features Brian Bartow (left) and Stirling Hart (right), two of the fastest tree climbers out there. The top record to beat is 17.04 seconds, which includes going all the way up and then getting all the way back down. Bartow and Hart come very close in this bout.
There are also intermediate and novice categories; intermediates climb to a 60-foot mark and back down, while novices just climb up, with the descent going untimed. Outfitted with ropes and harness, when it's time to come down, these guys keep their legs mostly out of the way and use the rope to half-slide half-fly.
Watch out for splinters, eh?
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Portugal had, until very recently, been generating up to half its energy with combustible energies like coal, oil, and natural gas. But the country has also been ambitious with renewable sources, relying on renewables for 48 percent of all of its power last year, and more than tripling its output of wind energy in just three years.
Still, it was remarkable when the country announced that for four days, it powered itself on renewable energy alone, according to the Guardian.
For 107 hours, from May 7 to May 11, Portugal was the greenest country in the world.
This wasn't exactly intentional. The output of wind and solar farms can vary based on a lot of factors, mainly, of course, how windy or sunny any given day is. And energy use can also vary—fair weather can mean that fewer air conditioners are on, for example.
A huge part of the feat involved wind power. The Iberian Peninsula is so suited for wind farms, in fact, that the country has high hopes for a new industry: exporting renewable power to the rest of Europe.
This will require “an increased build-out of interconnectors, a reformed electricity market and political will,” Oliver Joy, a spokesman for an industry association, told the Guardian. “But with the right policies in place, wind could meet a quarter of Europe’s power needs in the next 15 years.”
A 3-D scan of the Ballymorereagh Ogham stone. The inscription translates to "Cellach son of Mac-Áine." (Photo: Nora White/Ogham in 3-D)
As an archaeological linguist working in Dublin, Nora White has spent her fair share of time digging through archives and poring over manuscripts. But when she wants a real taste of Irish history, she skips the library altogether. She heads to a hilltop or a secluded field, and she looks for a weathered old rock with slashes cut into the sides.
White studies Ogham—a mysterious Irish alphabet found on hundreds of scattered stones all over the country. Also called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet" due to its unusual letter scheme, Ogham dates back to at least the 4th century, when Gaelic speakers created it in order to translate the unique sounds of their language into written form. Today, they're fonts of linguistic knowledge and scholarly mystery, and lightning rods for cross-millennial empathy. "There is no doubt that you get a feeling of connection with the past," says White. "You can't help but wonder about the person commemorated and the one commissioned to carve the stone."
On a purely linguistic level, Ogham isn't too hard to master. Each of its 20 characters, or "trees," is made out of a reference line, or "stem," crossed by one or more slashes, or "twigs." Depending on the number and direction of these twigs, the letter codes for a particular sound. To aid in memorization, each letter also has a name—often, though not always, a tree that starts with the sound the letter represents. The "B" sound, for example, has one twig sticking out on the right, and is called "Beithe," or birch tree.
When scholars memorized the letters, they'd group them by twig direction, and count up by twig number. The right-sided twigs go "Beighe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin" ("birch, herb, alder, willow, letters"). The horizontal slash-throughs go "Ailm, Onn, Ur, Edad, Idad" ("pine, ash, earth, wild cherry"). It's like the alphabet song, but with groups of trees instead of melodic clusters—not that difficult for those who like puzzles.
But Ogham's unique material structure makes it a little tougher than your average paper-bound alphabet. "Most inscriptions on stone are in the face of the stone," says White. "But with Ogham, it wraps around the angled edge of the stone." Because of this, Ogham provides a uniquely physical reading experience—after you've broken a sweat finding the right rock, proper analysis requires examining it on all sides. Inscriptions generally start on the lower left, sweep up along the top edge, and then go back down on the right.
An Ogham stone at Kilmalkedar. This one commemorates "Máel-Inbher, son of Broccán." (Photo: Patrice78500/Public Domain)
This also presents particular challenges to archaeologists, says White. Although past scholars have come up with workarounds, the stones' multi-dimensional orientation means ordinary drawings and photographs don't get across the whole story. To fix this—and to preserve the inscriptions as the stones inevitably weather—White has spent the last couple of years making three-dimensional scans of all the ones she can get to, as part of the "Ogham in 3-D" project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies's School of Celtic Studies.
On scanning days, she and a surveyor from Ireland's Discovery Programme lug their materials out to whatever front yard, remote hilltop, or sheep field holds the stone they need. "They're very often in out-of-the-way places," she says."You have to make sure there's no livestock in the field." Because the 3-D scanner only works in completely blackness, they pitch a blackout tent over the stone, and let their equipment read it in the dark. If a stone is too big for the tent, they work at night.
Besides providing new linguistic insights and an accessible, complete corpus, White hopes their work may shed a little more light on Ogham's mysterious past. Various legends present dramatic accounts: One says it was conjured up by the Celtic god of eloquence, Ogmios, who dragged his followers along by golden chains coming out of his tongue. Another holds that it was made up by a Scythian king named Fenius as an new ideal composite language, after the fall of the Tower of Babel destroyed the world's existing ones.
Scholars have their own, slightly more grounded theories. Some speculate it was invented as a secret language, meant to be indecipherable by the neighboring Brits, who presented a constant threat of invasion and used the Latin alphabet. Others think it was created by Christian communities, who found it difficult to translate Gaelic sounds into Latin letters. White isn't sure about the secret-code claims—the language seems too easy to learn for that—but then again, she's not sure why Ogham exists at all. "If they had this Latin alphabet, why create a whole new one for Irish?" she asks.
The answer may lay with the language's new fans. Since the project launched, she's heard from dozens of people asking her to come examine their local big, beat-up stone, to see if it's got the right kind of slashes. There's a strong pull to a language like that, unique and mystical and literally embedded in the landscape. "Maybe they just wanted to keep their own identity," she says. "All we can do is speculate." And, of course, keep reading.
In the mid 1990s, thousands of trees in California’s coastal forests began to die. Leaves turned brown very suddenly, and sap leaked from trunks, creating a forest of bleeding trees. Some were covered in insects, but no wounds or damage could be found. Later known as Sudden Oak Death (SOD), the damage caused by a microscopic pathogen began killing off over one million of California’s oak and tanoak trees rapidly, threatening whole ecosystems.
At the moment SOD seems wildly out of control, even unstoppable. But for the last 16 years, California has had an Oak Mortality Task Force, a consortium of researchers, public agencies and private interests, who learn more about the pathogen and prevent its further spread. It was difficult for the group’s first members to know where to start, though, when the state’s trees began inexplicably dying en masse. “It's kind of a sad story,” says communications director Katie Harrell. "No one knew what was going on."
The biggest problem was that no one suspected that a small pathogen was killing the trees; when the pathogen was first discovered in 1995, most believed that the deaths were caused by insects. Matteo Garbelotto, professor and forest pathology expert at UC Berkeley’s forest and mycology lab, was one of the first two people to discover the disease. “In the beginning it was hard, because I had just been hired by Berkeley, and the second month after I was hired I make this huge discovery,” says Garbelotto, who still studies the pathogen and ways to subdue it.
By the year 2000, Garbelotto believed that insects could not have been the culprit. Garbelotto and his lab spent over two years cultivating the pathogen in petri dishes and analyzing infected leaves before he proved his working hypothesis that not only was Sudden Oak Death caused by a pathogen, it was an entirely new species of Phytophthora, now called Phytophthora ramorum (P. ramorum). P. ramorum is an oomycete (often called a water mold) that is distinct from molds and fungi, and is actually closely related to kelp and diatoms. It’s also more distantly related to the same pathogen that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1800s—and it can be as difficult to control. “What [Phytophthora in general] do normally, they do very well—and that is kill plants,” says Garbelotto. But until he discovered its attributes, scientists had a hard time understanding how P. ramorum worked; unlike other Phytophthora species, it doesn’t need water to spread during its mobile phase. Like the measles of the plant world, P. ramorum can go airborne.
The pathogen quietly attacks a tree by burrowing into the leaves or the bark. Microscopic pods called sporangia float across the air from an infected plant and land on a new leaf’s surface, in a process that sounds like it could have inspired a few science fiction films. The sporangia pod opens up at the tip. “It looks like a flying saucer with a little hatch that opens up,” says Garbelotto. The tiny UFO releases around 20 even tinier spores, which have two tails which rotate and propel the spore down to the surface of the leaf. The spore gains energy from the leaf through an attachment process that lets it penetrate the tissue; if the pathogen is nearer the tree trunk, its spores produce tubes that fit through tiny natural holes in the bark’s surface.
From there, the pathogen grows and expands, slowly sucking all of the nutrients and sugars away from the plant’s roots and leaves simultaneously. Oak trees excrete chemicals to kill the invader, but P. ramorum has no problem getting around the defense. The tree begins to bleed sap in a last-ditch effort, opening it up to other opportunistic pathogens and parasites, like certain tree-eating beetles and insects. Trees store their energy in dry California weather, and the disease quietly takes full advantage of them until their resources are suddenly used up—hence the name Sudden Oak Death. By the time a tree’s leaves turn brown and symptoms appear, an infected tree could have already been dead for years.
While it’s not entirely clear how or when P. ramorum came to the U.S., many people suspect it arrived via the ornamental plant trade in the 1980s (possibly from Asia, where its closest relative seems to live). Before P. ramorum, plant diseases were diagnosed by external symptoms alone. Thanks to the efforts of Garbelotto and others, the ornamental plant industry is now controlled very tightly; his lab is currently analyzing all possible plants that could contract the disease.
Headlines about the ‘unstoppable’ disease that has killed a million trees might lead the public to believe that all hope is lost—that we didn’t have the information to beat the pathogen in 2002, and now there’s nothing left to be done. This is far from accurate. Although “we don’t have a single example of an introduced forest disease that has ever been successfully eradicated,” says Garbelotto, there are indeed proven ways to lower tree deaths, stave the disease off, and prevent infections so it doesn’t get out of control.
What people can do to reduce Sudden Oak Death infection–and what the California Oak Mortality Task Force does–is use a tree’s natural defenses to lessen the pathogen’s prominence. For the last eight years, Garbelotto and his lab have successfully used a benign spray made of phosphites, which triggers a tree’s microbial attack response into overdrive. Even without the spray, some oak species, including juvenile tanoaks, appear to outgrow the infection during dry weather, a phenomena Garboletto and others are studying more now.
So some trees do survive--it’s all a matter of upping the trees’ survival chances, planting less susceptible trees, and keeping the pathogen away from more susceptible trees. Not moving firewood to new locations (such as campgrounds) is key. Sometimes tree removal is the answer; bay laurels in particular help P. ramorum infect other trees, similar to how mosquitoes spread disease in humans.Helpfully, the disease can only move up to 200 yards.
“In some cases, all that it takes is to remove Bay Laurels that are just a few feet away from the oak,” says Garbelotto. Though the disease will continue to spread, humans can create “a quilt, like a checkerboard, where we are going to have areas that are protected,” says Garbelotto.
Since infected trees are often asymptomatic, to see if the trees near you are in danger of Sudden Oak Death, both Harrell and Garbelotto recommend an app from UC Berkeley calledSODMAP, which uses real samples collected by citizen scientists to locate known infected trees. The map shows the nearest infected trees in your area, allowing landowners to implement prevention tactics if their trees are at risk. The app is available on smartphones, and free to use.
Harrell says the yearly flyover surveys by the forest service will soon begin for the season. These efforts aim to monitor the forests, and try to catch new areas that have been hit; later in the year, ground troops will get a closer look at the trees. However, most treatment hinge on private efforts to control the disease by landowners, who must bear the cost of treating or removing trees themselves.
Unfortunately, the public is fickle. If a disease like SOD is visibly out of control and is threatening whole forests, we care, but as soon as the situation becomes hopeless, or conversely, seems less dire because of the silent nature of the disease, attention to it quickly wanes. “The pathogen activity ebbs and flows with water patterns, so if you have dry years, the pathogen isn’t doing much [visually],” says Harrell. “It’s hard to keep people focused on an issue when it’s not in their face.”
If people don’t continue the fight, however, the situation could become urgent. “The reality is, another side effect of not doing anything is that [the pressure of infection] can facilitate jumping over to new hosts,” says Garbelotto. He points out that P. ramorum might already be capable of infecting other species, and that it’s unknown how it will interact with new ecosystems. It’s not just about saving the oaks and tanoaks; it’s about preventing that pathogen from experimenting with other plants and crops.
And that makes Sudden Oak Death more than an issue for forest preserves in secluded areas. It’s also a human problem. Our ability to subdue Sudden Oak Death is less about what we didn’t do or know in the past, and more what we’re willing to do now, even on a small scale.
“That’s kind of my hope,” says Garbelotto. “I know the disease is going to get worse and worse--it’s going to occupy more land, but I’m hoping there are going to be communities that [fight the disease]...that’s what’s going to give us these pockets of higher survival.” The message is clear: if we’re willing to put up the fight, our forests might stand a chance. The trees can’t do it alone.
The Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramid of the Sun to the left. (Photo: eu tirada/Public Domain)
Teotihuacán is mysterious. A city that probably started around 400 B.C., before it was abandoned over 1,000 years later, this central Mexican civilization has long puzzled archaeologists, as Teotihuacanos seemingly left no written records.
Were they ruled by a single, all-powerful king? Or was it a council? What was their religion? What language did they speak? We simply don't know.
But 13 years ago, as Matthew Shaer reports in Smithsonian, an archaeologist who has devoted his entire career to the Teotihuacanos stumbled upon a secret: a tunnel, specifically, that no one knew existed before. It was built under a temple in the city.
Six years later, the archaeologist, Sergio Gómez, began excavating. What he uncovered was a trove of artifacts, from necklaces to knives to bones. And Gomez might find more: there are three chambers still to be excavated.
The tunnel was apparently not supposed to be found. Boulders blocked its entrance, and Gómez says that he thinks it was meant to be sealed forever.
Some had thought Gómez might find a tomb, lending credence to the theory that Teotihuacanos were led by a single ruler. But while no proper tomb has yet been found, the archaeologist thinks of the tunnel and its chambers as a "symbolic 'tomb': a final resting place for the city’s founders, of gods and men," as Shaer writes.
As for the artifacts? Two stick out: a pair of black stone statues that Gómez says might have stood in for Teotihuacanos' Creators, objects to be worshiped. The rest will be studied for decades, unlocking the secrets of Teotihuacán one necklace at a time.
Boris Johnson, until last year the mayor of London, one of the largest cities in the world, has a lot of opinions. And he's known for a good quote.
"I've slept with far fewer than 1,000 [women]," he said once, for example.
My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive," he has also said, of the prospects of him becoming Prime Minister.
Or take this, about cake: "My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it."
A former college debater with unruly hair and some unruly opinions—including a fervent belief in free speech—it was still perhaps hard to imagine that he might one day write a poem about the Turkish president having sex with a goat.
It came as more of a surprise that said poem won a poetry contest, specifically the Spectator's Offensive Poetry contest. Here is the poem in full:
There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankerer Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn’t even stop to thankera.
How did we get to this point? The Spectator launched the competition after a German comedian made a bestiality joke about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which upset Erdoğan, who then urged German authorities to prosecute the comedian. (That situation is ongoing.)
Johnson offered the limerick in solidarity with the comedian. But is it prizeworthy? We'll let the public decide.
Among the 8.5 millions humans of New York City, there sure are a lot of dogs. And if you were to pick one at random, it's most likely that it would be a Yorkshire Terrier named Max, living on the Upper West Side. That, and every 63rd dog he runs into is also named Max, in some form or another: “Maxie,” “Maxflower,” “Maxamilion,” “Maximus Von Warrior-Lemon.”
According to new data recently released by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in response to a FOIL request by Eliecer Pascal, "Max" remains, next to “Bella,” the favorite among the 81,290 licensed canine companions in NYC.
Curiously, when MuckRock founder Michael Morisy put in the same request in 2010 in Somerville, dog owners also favored those names - making them good go-tos if you’re trying to beckon a strange creature in either place.
Maybe you’re trying to own the only Karelian bear dog? Too late! There are already two!
Or perhaps you’ve have settled on Barkley as just the most clever and perfect name ever. Aha! There are 32 of them - best to go with Barley, of which there are only 14..
Those looking to embark on a dog breed scavenger hunt of New York City have plenty of fodder. Spot Samantha - the only Kai Ken in New York - along the banks of Williamsburg! Behold the rare Peruvian Inca Orchid, “Fabio Texas”!
You’ll find most of the city’s dogs on the Upper West Side - zip codes 10025, 10024, 10023 - where Hudson is a popular name. One clever person went so far as to just name their Labrador Retriever Crossbreed“Hudson River.”
Willow bark can be used as a bittering agent to make beer. (Photo: Pascal Baudar)
Trees provide us with lots to eat―all kinds of nuts, fruits, and berries, not to mention maple syrup. But what about the other stuff: can we eat the trees themselves?
It turns out we sure can. While trees should not be your go-to forager's fare (in fact, they’re more of a famine food), their different parts can be repurposed into all kinds of nibbles, often venturing into the gourmet.
We chatted with several dedicated foragers to get the inside scoop on how best to eat trees. Here's a guide to what we found: the edible parts of trees.
Sassafras roots and bark are used to make different teas and beer. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Cambium Cambium is the layer of inner bark between the hard wood and the rough, papery outer bark: it’s a soft, moist, paler layer, the part of the trunk that is actively growing. It’s nutrient rich, and if you taste it, can actually be sweet, though the taste can vary a lot from tree to tree. The cambium of hundreds of trees―most, in fact―is edible, and can be harvested throughout all four seasons.
If you’re desperate, or just curious, you can try chewing it, kind of like gum. More palatable, perhaps, is if you shred cambium into strips and boil it, to soften the texture and taste, or turn it into chips or bark jerky by frying it in oil or butter. Dry roasting can create an almost crouton-like salad topping. However, it’s most commonly (and historically) repurposed as a flour: dried and then pounded into a powder, which can then be used in breads and baking, and added to other flours.
But you won't last long on cambium alone, and if you eat too much of it, you’ll definitely upset your bowels. Naturalist and self-declared "Wildman" Steve Brill says that if you’re trying to survive on cambium, you have no idea what you’re doing.
Just pluck it off and pop it in your mouth. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Spruce Tips Delivering a strong taste of pine and citrus, spruce tips are easy to gather and currently in season. You’ll find them on evergreens, such as the spruce and pine, as the trees are growing their new needles for the year. Those small, young, soft bits at the end of branches―a lighter color than the matured needles―are fully edible, and tender enough to just eat them on the spot. Karen Monger, who runs a website devoted to family foraging, says that her kids like to chew them plain.
You can also candy them, or use them to infuse a sugar or salt by mashing them with mortar and pestle; adding a cupful of spruce tips while baking scones or shortbread adds a really interesting flavor, says Debbie Naha, a naturalist and nutritionist who specializes in wild edible plants.
Though spruce tips are only available in spring, pine needles are perennial, and you can give the needles of the white pine a quick chop and simmer to make tea, which Naha notes is a good source of Vitamin C.
Alder bark can be used as a bittering agent for primitive beer and also to provide a reddish color. (Photo: Pascal Baudar)
Outer bark While today, bark is not seen as a viable or appealing food source, you might be surprised to know that the name “Adirondack”―best known for the mountain range, but also the name of a Native American tribe―derives from the Mohawk Indian word atirú:taks, which actually means “tree eaters.” It appears to have been a derogatory term used on neighboring Algonquian tribes who would resort to buds and bark when food was scarce.
Bark flour has made numerous cameos as an emergency food; for example, during World War I, there’s evidence of ground birch bark being added to enhance rations. During World War II, since flour was expensive, wood chip powder was regularly used as a filler.
The bark of the black birch has strongly wintergreen-flavored inner bark and twigs, that can be made into birch beer, used to flavor drinks and desserts. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Sassafras bark and root are used to make the traditional Southern tea, as well as traditional root beer. The bark of the hickory nut tree can be stripped off and boiled into a simple syrup, that boasts an earthy, nutty flavor and can be added to breakfast foods and baked meats.
Birch bark can be used as a flavoring, providing a sweet, wintergreen kind of taste. In parts of Scandinavia, pine bark is reduced to powder and made into cookies with the subtle flavor of Christmas. The ponderosa pine, for example, smells distinctly of vanilla.
Pascal Baudar's shrimp cooked in eucalyptus bark with mountain spices such as white fir and manzanita berries. (Photo: Pascal Baudar)
In the middle ages, a lot of bitter barks were used to make beer, as well as being used for dyes, says Pascal Baudar, a professional forager and wild food consultant. Baudar likes to roast bark and use it in vinegar, which imparts a smoky, aged taste.
He’ll sometimes smoke and roast old bark and put it in sauerkraut, or he might infuse the bark with beer or white wine and use it cook fish. Baudar also uses bark as part of his concoction to make bitters, but a lot of the time, he simply uses bark to plate the food, rather than as an ingredient itself.
Linden tree bracts and flowers, which make an aromatic and relaxing herbal tea. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Leaves To answer your burning question: yes, you can make trees into salad. The young, tender leaves of trees like the beech, birch, Chinese elm, fennel, mulberry, hawthorne, sassafras, and linden can be tossed into a salad, though some are better tasting than others. You can also pick and eat them fresh off the tree.
Steven Brill has used the very young leaves of white oak trees to make wine (the best wild wine he’s ever made, he says). Leaves, like cambium, have also served as a famine food in the past, as well as being used for medicinal purposes.
Black locust flowers, equally beautiful and delicious, can be used to make sweet and fragrant crepes, doughnuts, drinks, and custards—though all other parts of the tree are toxic. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Flowers A number of trees grow delicious flowers. Right now, says Naha, the redbud tree boasts beautiful and very nutritious pink flowers, which are packed with antioxidants. And, if you miss your window, you’re still in luck: when the flowers fade, they turn into tiny pods, which can be cooked and eaten like snow peas.
The flowers of the linden tree are the most famous, used in various calming teas and cordials. Those of the black locust are also scrumptious, though be careful―they’re the only part of that tree that isn’t toxic.
Pine pollen, apparently high in testosterone, is used as a dietary supplement, added to baked goods and smoothies. (Photo: The 3 Foragers)
Other comestibles Maple trees are not the only trees from which you can collect sap. People sometimes tap birch, black walnut, and hickory trees, though their sap has a lower sugar concentration than that of the maple, which makes transformation into syrup too much of a hassle.
Pine trees boast a cornucopia of edible parts. Not only can the cambium, needles, and tips be used in food, but pine cones―the young, male ones―are also edible. The male cones are small and soft, in contrast with their tougher female counterparts. In fact, they are less cones and more clusters (strobilus). On top of that, pine pollen is also collected for use as a dietary supplement.
As for all those tree branches? The twigs of some trees, like the birch and spice bush, can be scratched to extract flavor for drinks, puddings, and sorbets, according to Monger, of The 3 Foragers blog.
There’s definitely a learning curve―don’t just set off into the nearest forest and start tasting plants. While the bark and cambium of most trees is edible, or at least harmless, there are also toxic ones loaded with tannin and cyanide, like in yew and cherry trees.
The ultimate toxic tree is the deadly manchineel, which you should not touch or even go near. You should also be mindful of the trees themselves; when you are harvesting the inner bark, you must make sure not to strip off an entire ring or you’ll kill the tree, cutting off the irrigation system that allows water from the roots to reach the leaves. Brill says that you’d have to be a very particular kind of herbivore―one who specializes in browsing rather than grazing―to really make food out of trees.
And while the internet provides all kinds of field guides, foraging blogs and apps, your best move is to find a forager in your area and go out with them. Dedicated foragers go out nearly every day, and they know exactly where to look―which means that for the most part, you won’t be looking at trees.
The Harvard Forest Hurricane Manipulation project in 1990. (Photo: Marcheterre Fluet)
When Jerome Howard visited the forest in the Bayou Sauvage refuge after Hurricane Katrina, in May 2006, he found a tangle of blown-down trunks. Most of the standing trees were dead, too. The forest was grey and barren. The trees that had survived looked to be Chinese tallow trees, an invasive species.
Years earlier,Howard, an associate professor at the University of New Orleans, had chosen this spot to study the effect of Chinese tallow on the insects cycling nutrients back into the soil. That study “was more or less hijacked by the storm,” he says. There were no insects, no snakes, no small animals to be seen, and he couldn’t locate the sites he had spent years working on.
Before the storm, you could see a quarter mile through an open gallery of green shade from the ridge. It had felt like a secret. The forest was on a ridge that had been cleared in the 1840s for sugar cane, then left to grow wild with oaks, maples and palmettos. Faced with the site’s devastation, Howard changed his plan. He would study the damage the hurricane had done to this piece of forest.
When a hurricane makes landfall, trees lose leaves and branches; they sway, twist, and rock, until some bend or break. Detached branches or falling trunks damage other trees. The water, soaking the soil and loosening its hold on roots, makes it easier for the wind to wreak havoc. Salt water, flooding in, can kill on its own: the trees that Howard saw still standing had been killed by the storm surge.
Across the Gulf, forests lost an estimated 320 million large trees to Hurricane Katrina. Baldcypress, with its knobbly roots kneeling above the ground, could withstand the storm, but in areas of red maple and sweetgum, sometimes two-thirds of the trees were damaged. New Orleans lost 70 percent of its urban forest, not just during the storm but in the cleanup that followed, too. It can take 20 years for a forest to recover from a hurricane. The Gulf’s forest are only about halfway through their convalescence.
In the days and years after a storm, humans focus on the damage to our homes and cities before they worry about more wild places–but there’s a good reason for us to investigate what’s happened in our forests, too. Forests are one of our best allies against climate change, yet if hurricanes knock them down, not only are there fewer trees to suck up carbon from the atmosphere, but downed trees release carbon as they decompose.
In 1990, at the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, forestry scientists brought in a winch to pull down 276 trees in a simulation of a hurricane. Scientists had gone out to document the damage in the aftermath of major storms, but there had never been a controlled study of the impacts of a hurricane. When a storm passes through, it’s difficult to find an unaffected stretch of forest to compare directly to a damaged one. This simulation would allow the researchers to monitor conditions in both the damaged forest and a control plot.
Harvard Forest scientists run projects that can stretch across decades. Many look at how stresses change or challenge forests, and they need long stretches of time to understand forests’ responses to these disturbances. They have plots with heightened nitrogen levels, with soil heated to simulate climate change, and with hemlocks removed to show the impact of species loss.
When Audrey Barker Plotkin began working on the Hurricane Manipulation project, in 1998, it was still difficult to walk through the simulation plot. She had to clamber over decomposing trunks, skirt the dips uprooted trees had left in the ground, and navigate the mounds of dirt, roots and debris the trees had excavated when they fell. The saplings that had grown since the original damage reached her face level, and moving around the plot was like walking through a wall of leaves. The trees had been pulled over so that they fell towards the northwest, to match observed effects of past hurricanes, which forced her to move in that direction whether she wanted to or not.
In the hurricane simulation, the scientists originally hypothesized that opportunistic, light-loving plants would move into the disturbed area and change the character of the forest. What they’ve found, over time, surprised them: the forest was extremely resilient to damage, and the trees that lived there before the storm were triumphing over newcomers. Although it looked like a mess, the invisible systems that kept the forest ticking were unruffled. (In the soil-heated plot, the forest looks fine, but the life-sustaining systems that go on in the soil are changing dramatically.)
Now, more than twenty-five years into the study, the forest “feels like a more civilized place to walk around,” says Barker Plotkin.
The Harvard Forest in 1999. (Photo: Audrey Barker Plotkin)
The most recent set of data, collected last summer, looks to fit along those same lines. One of the questions she is still considering, though, is how the hurricane affects a forest’s carbon uptake. The rate in this one hasn’t changed much, but what happens to all the carbon embodied in the dead trees? Does the forest ever recover the carbon lost when the disturbance happens?
This is the question most pressing for people right now. We’re hoping trees will help us mop up the carbon we’re soaking into the atmosphere: they breathe in carbon dioxide, after all. But if they keel over when a storm comes, it seems like they’re not doing the job we need them to.
The picture isn’t quite so clear here, though. All that stormwater can damage trees, but it can also provide them with a draught of freshwater. In a recent study, Lauren Lowman and Ana Barros, environmental engineers at Duke University, quantified how tropical cyclones impacted plant activity and found that it could account for almost 10 percent of their carbon uptake in some years. Even in a drought year, when forests capture less carbon, the boost provided by a cyclone can help forests soak up more carbon than all the vehicles in the U.S. emit in a year.
Human interference can mess these dynamics up. In the plot that Jerome Howard, the New Orleans biologist, was studying, the storm killed 68 percent of all the trees in the area, one of the highest rates of tree death in all the Gulf Coast.
When he started looking at aerial maps of the area, he realized why the death rate had been so high: forest managers had leveed the area, to create marsh habitat for migrating birds. When the storm hit, salt water rushed in and was trapped until the refuge could pump it out. The trees were sitting with their trunks soaking in salt water. That’s what killed them and made room for the more resilient Chinese tallow trees to take over.
Howard is proposing to resurvey the area, 10 years after he first returned to the forest, to document the patterns of tree growth. Perhaps he’ll be surprised, like the Harvard Forest scientists, to find that the opportunistic tallow trees have not done as well as he thought they might.
But the Harvard Forest also has some advantages—the simulated storm happened to a relatively small part of a generally healthy forest. In forests that are already more closely managed by humans, it can be hard not to intervene.
In New York, for instance, Superstorm Sandy felled hundreds of trees in Prospect Park, the only forest left in thickly populated Brooklyn. In the past four years, goutweed and English ivy, invasive plants that were already a problem in the park, have rushed into newly open areas and taken over.
This spring, the park decided to fight back. One area of the park that had been very damaged happened to have steep slopes that humans and machines find hard to navigate. The park brought in a herd of goats, who will eat almost anything, including goutweed and ivy, to tackle the invasives.
Perhaps, given another couple of decades, the trees that dominated before the storm would have chased new plants out. But the goats will speed up the process. Once you’ve started to interfere with a forest, whether by building a city around it or a levee in the middle of it, it’s no longer so good at dealing with a devastating event like a hurricane on its own.
A tree lawyer will help you determine liability when it comes to fallen trees. (Photo: slgckgc/CC BY 2.0)
It begins almost like that familiar tree-falls-in-the-woods saying, if that saying grew up to become a lawyer: if a tree falls on a car, and its trunk crosses two boundary lines, who is liable for the damages?
Unlike the tree-in-the-woods scenario, however, this conundrum has an answer. A tree’s trunk—where it emerges from the ground—dictates who owns it. If any part of its trunk crosses a boundary line, then it is jointly owned, and both parties bear responsibility for the damages that it might cause, if they did not take necessary steps to inspect and maintain that tree.
Welcome to the world of tree law, a little-known corner of the legal system that deals with everything tree-related, from fatalities caused by falling branches to disputes over a tree blocking a view. Did someone sneak onto your property and cut your tree without your consent? Better get yourself a tree lawyer. Were you hit by the falling branch of a decrepit city tree? Lawyer up and head to tree court.
“Tree law is anything that you can imagine that might give rise to disputes between people concerning trees,” says Barri Bonapart, a California tree lawyer. “That can be encroaching roots, that can be a loss of a view, that can be property damage or personal injury from a tree failure. It could be trespass and wrongful cutting or damaging of a tree, and anything and everything in between.”
But while all tree cases involve a tree in some way, Bonapart cautions that most of the time, the trees are just the tip of the problem.
“It's never about the trees,” Bonapart says. “The trees often serve as lightning rods for other issues that are the psychological underpinning of a dispute that people might have with each other.”
Tree lawyer Barri Bonapart. (Photo: Courtesy Barri Bonapart)
Like most attorneys that specialize in tree law, Bonapart did not graduate law school with the intention of becoming a tree lawyer. She spent years working in complex commercial litigation, representing faceless multinational corporations in multistate cases. Then, one day, a family friend approached her with a problem: a neighbor had cut down her blackwood acacias, and she wanted Bonapart’s help in collecting damages.
“I thought, as most lawyers do when they get their first tree case: ‘How hard can it be?’” Bonapart says. “I quickly learned it was very complex and very nuanced.”
In California, for instance, laws pertaining to trees can span as many as six sections in California’s Civil Code, while a single trespassing incident involving a tree could cover as many as three different sections of the state's Penal Code.
“All my cases are weird, wacky, and unique, and just when I think it can’t get any weirder or wackier, somebody else walks in the door,” she says.
While it’s likely that disputes and rules involving trees have been around for as long as trees have been considered property, many of the tree laws currently followed in the United States find their root in English common law from hundreds of years ago. Back then, the rules governing trees were fairly simple. If a your neighbor’s tree branches hung onto your property, for example, you were allowed, under common law, to cut them back to your boundary line. If that tree branch had fruit hanging on it, however, that fruit was essentially forbidden—under common law, any fruit hanging on a tree belonged to the owner of the tree, as to discourage neighbors from feasting on the fruits of someone else’s arboreal labors.
Under English common law, the fruit hanging from a tree belonged only to the owner of that tree. (Photo: Mike Linksvayer/Public Domain)
In the United States, tree law is mostly a product of case law, which is based on the outcomes of previous legal cases. That means that tree law can vary widely from state to state—a judge can rule based on past cases, or forge a new opinion—but there are still basic tenets that apply nationwide. Ownership of a tree, for instance, is dictated by where the trunk of the tree emerges from the ground—if even the slightest bit of a trunk goes through a property line, then it’s a jointly owned tree.
According to tree lawyers, most tree law cases revolve around neighbor disputes, like the cutting (without permission, sometimes out of retribution) of a neighbor’s tree, or whether one neighbor’s tree unfairly blocks another’s view. In most states, residents are allowed to cut any branches off of a tree that hangs onto their property, up to the boundary line, regardless of whether or not the tree ultimately survived the chopping—that’s known as the Massachusetts Rule, because it was first decided in a Massachusetts court. But a 1993 California case amended the Massachusetts Rule slightly by stipulating that anyone looking to chop down infringing tree branches or roots needs to act “reasonably,” which meant taking into account whether the action would ultimately damage the tree.
Most cases revolve around disputes like cutting a neighbor's tree without permission. (Photo: Mikhail Esteves/CC BY 2.0)
Other times, cases can be about damages caused by a falling tree—and in the worst cases, those fallen trees prove fatal. Lew Block, a consulting arborist and author of Tree Law Cases in the USA, once worked on a case in which both the defendant and plaintiff in the case were deceased, killed by the same falling tree.
“They were friends and lived next door, and were on the front walk chatting and the tree broke and fell and killed both of them,” Block says.
According to Victor Murello, a tree attorney in Columbus, Ohio, it is most common for tree law cases to crop up in urban areas, where dueling desires for personal space and abundant landscaping often result in disputes over trees. United States tree law even has a special rule for people in urban areas, which is that every tree in an urban area must be inspected and maintained by its owner. If the owner of that tree fails to inspect or maintain that tree, and it falls and hits a person or thing, then that owner is liable.
Tree owners in rural areas, on the other hand, face less stringent requirements.
In rural areas, there is less onus on maintaining and inspecting trees. (Photo: Hector G./CC BY-SA 2.0)
“In the rural area, the courts are not so strict about doing individual inspections of trees,” Murello explains, noting, however, that a ruling out of a Connecticut court found that as the risk of potential harm caused by a tree increases, the duty to inspect that tree also increases—regardless of whether it's located on a lightly traveled rural highway or a bustling urban walkway.
Overall, Murello—who has been practicing tree law since 1974—says that he has seen a marked increase in the number of tree cases brought to court in recent years. That uptick has given Murello plenty to write about on his blog, and in his email newsletter, where interested readers can have a different tree case delivered to their inbox each day.
“There are so many more cases going to court now,” he says.
Bonapart agrees, noting that her office turns away more cases than it can take.
“It is insane the number of disputes that people have over trees.”
And while Bonapart says that she thinks of her job as helping to “heal the rifts in our social fabric,” her particular speciality has made it more difficult to find a good parking spot.
“I look at it and I wonder, ‘Should I park under that tree? It looks like it may lose a limb,’” she said. “I find myself thinking about and looking at trees in a very different way, both the wonderful aspects of the trees but also the liability aspects as well.”
Florida has crocodiles, but they are American crocodiles. The kind of crocodiles that look a little bit evil and, yeah, you probably don’t want to get too close to its mouth. But they won’t kill you. Nile crocodiles, native to Africa, will. They can grow to 16 feet long, and they’re responsible for about 200 deaths each year in sub-Saharan Africa. Now, of course, they are in Florida.
A group of Florida herpetologists started collecting “unusual looking crocodilians” a few years back, based on reports from the public. One hatchling was found on a porch; two larger crocodiles were found in Homestead, an area south of Miami and on one of the main roads leading to the Everglades. Those second two were related to each other; probably the first one was, too, although problems with the DNA samples kept the scientists from saying so definitively. In a newly published study, they identified the crocodiles as Nile crocodiles.
How did these crocs get to Florida? They’re imported for use in animal attractions; the Orlando Sentinel notes that these Nile crocodiles are not related to those at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. More likely, they were brought in for pet trade or a less carefully run operation. Still, “We don’t really know how they got into the wild,” one of the herpetologists told the Sentinel.
If these Nile crocodiles start living in the Florida wilds, though, they could create real problems, for humans and for other crocodiles. They’re more dangerous to us; they also may outcompete native crocs. Or, it’s possible they’ll hybridize. The Everglades National Park, where the third crocodile was ultimately captured, says there aren’t other Nile crocodiles in the park. But the scientists think there are probably more out there somewhere.
That's cool, we're not worried at all about invasive killer crocodiles...
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
There is something wondrous about the idea of living in a tree. High off the ground and shrouded by leaves, a treehouse is a place to escape.
And not just for kids.
The new book Dream Treehouses shows us how treehouses can be spectacular architecture. Designed by French company La Cabane Perchée, the treehouses included in this book are an elaborate realization of a childhood dream. The structures can be roomy (as much as 300 square feet) and tall (65 feet up!). They’re also ecologically sound—no nails are used on the trees. Instead, the structures are supported by rubberized rings.
Escape into these images of lofty, elegant treetop living.
A treehouse nestled 15 feet up in a pine tree.
Looking up a beech tree.
A treehouse in France that is used as a painting studio, with a staircase that winds 23 feet up the trunk of an oak tree.
A tree-top guest room with a terrace in France.
A spiral staircase leading to a house in an oak tree.
A restaurant terrance 25 feet above the ground, in a 400 year old plane tree.
The terrace of a family treehouse.
A 60 sq ft cabin in an oak tree, in France.
A treehouse on four legs in the middle of a pine forest.
At France's waterfront Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez, seagulls are a scourge. They steal peanuts from the bar. They screech down to the tables and airlift entire steaks. During the celebrity-stocked Cannes Film Festival season, they provide unwanted fashion commentary, spilling red wine on various red carpet dresses.
All the bad press in the world can't stop them. So for the past few Cannes seasons, the hotel has hired security the gulls will listen to: other birds. Specifically, as Agence France-Presse reports, a team of vigilant hawks.
"My job is to scare the seagulls away with hawks," the hotel's hired fauconnier, Christopher Puzin, told VICE. (When it's not festival season, the hawks make their living scaring sparrows away from supermarkets.) For this job, Puzin uses five Harris hawks, which are native to the American southwest, and are great at wrangling smaller birds just by looking at them. At Cannes, they hover about 500 feet above the tables like surveillance drones, warning gulls and pigeons to stay out. If provoked, they go in for the kill.
"We've changed the behavior of animals by changing the environment—urban, industrial, and rural, thereby creating an imbalance," Puzin says. As he points out, the seagulls only come to the tables because so many customers offered them bread scraps. "Our mission is to protect both the predator and prey by restoring the order of the ecosystem."
What if the hawks figure this out, and decide to restore balance in a more direct fashion? Should we be afraid?
"We are prey that would be a bit too big for them," Puzin says. Plus, we're the ones feeding them chicken necks.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
It got hot in the central Indian town of Phalodi on Thursday. Very hot. Or 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit hot.
That's a new record for the country, besting a previous mark that had stood for 60 years.
Power use surged as residents cranked up air conditioners, and zoo animals were given cold baths, according to Agence France-Presse. But there may not be much relief for a while: Temperatures on Friday peaked at 115 degrees, and Saturday's forecast was for highs of 110.
Further, this year's monsoon won't arrive until mid-June at the earliest, meaning that, for now, residents will have to make do.
Heat waves are frequently deadly in India, already claiming dozens of lives this year, according to the BBC. Last year more than 2,400 people died because of the heat.
A paloverde tree stands guard in an Arizona desert. In 1993, one of these trees helped solve a crime when it dropped its distinct seeds into a murderer's pickup truck. (Photo: $1LENCE D00600D/CC BY-SA 3.0)
In June of 2015, a woman out walking her dog on the shore of Boston's Deer Island came across a garbage bag, opened it up, and found the body of a dead baby girl, wrapped in a fleece blanket.
It was a nightmare scenario, and a very difficult case. The victim's clothes were generic, and the water had rubbed off her fingerprints. An autopsy revealed next to nothing. A computer-generated image of the girl, nicknamed "Baby Doe," was blasted across the nation's social networks, but turned up no clues. Indeed, detectives knew nothing about her—until they found some pine pollen on her blanket. This told them that she was local, significantly narrowing the scope of the investigation. By September, she had been identified, and suspects are currently on trial.
Another case solved with forensic botany.
For forensic botanists, plants make up a whole class of readily available witnesses. They can't spill their guts, or confess what they overheard, but when it comes to many the questions involved in solving a crime—the who, when, and where especially—their mere presence is enough. A unique seed pod found in a suspect's pickup can cast suspicion on his self-proclaimed whereabouts, as happened in a 1993 Arizona case involving a murdered woman found beneath a paloverde tree. Or marijuana confiscated from different sites can be DNA-analyzed, with identical strains used to trace drug traffickers.
The first botanist to branch out into forensics was Arthur Koehler, who, as a wood expert at the United States Forest Products Laboratory, lent his expertise to a number of cases in the 1920s and '30s. Koehler used his knowledge of tree taxonomy and cellular structure to testify about the provenance of wood used in homemade bombs and weapons. Most famously, he served as a star expert witness in the so-called Trial of the Century, the 1935 Lindbergh Kidnapping Case.
When Koehler took the stand in court, the defense originally objected, saying that "there is no animal known among men as an expert in wood," and calling him "merely a man who has had a lot of experience in examining trees." But by the end of the trial, Koehler had convinced the jury that, based on microscopic examination and his own robust carpentry experience, he could determine the exact provenance of the ladder found leaning into the window of the crime scene. After he traced it back to a lumberyard in the Bronx—and matched one of its replaced rungs to a plank of wood found in carpenter Bruno Hauptmann's attic—Hauptmann was convicted, and, soon after, executed.
Eight decades later, Koehler's legacy continues. Plenty of botanists, at the Forest Products Laboratory and elsewhere, now moonlight as consultants. As a paleoecologist, Sara Hotchkiss, a professor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spends most of her time trying to figure out how human activity impacted historical ecosystems—but when the coroner's office calls her up, she knows how to help them solve more current problems. "The same methods I can use to reconstruct what used to grow here thousands of years ago are the methods that you might use to reconstruct where this thing has been over the past few weeks or months, or when something died," she says.
Pine pollen is a crafty hitchhiker. Researchers recently determined that it can remain on certain types of clothing for up to two weeks. (Photo: Famartin/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Digging into particular mysteries solved by forensic botany is, like most exercises of this type, largely sad and gruesome. Last year, There was the woman in Taipei who was originally thought to have died in a hit-and-run accident until leaves were found in her hair; experts determined that they came from a potted plant a few stories above the street, and that the woman had jumped out the window, hitting the plant on the way down. There was the elderly Florida man found chopped up in pieces around South Florida. Twigs and leaves found in the buckets with his body parts matched up with a tree in his accused killer's front yard.
Despite all this blood and drama, actual forensic botanists are quick to point out that the job is less Law & Order: S-Tree-U and more daily science grind. "I think a lot of people have this idea that forensic work is bells, whistles, whodunit, and drama," says Alex Widenhoeft, a botanist at the Center for Wood Anatomy Research. "The truth is much less colorful." His favorite days are spent at the microscope, poring over samples: "Good, clean fun, but not very dramatic."
Don't worry, apartment-dwellers—even potted trees can help solve crimes. (Photo: echang/PixaBay/CC0)
Hotchkiss emphasizes the great uncertainties that come with her work, and the lack of one-to-one answers available to anyone working with such fickle subjects. "Pollen is tiny and it flies around, and it's going to be variable in any given area," she says. Having a sample of it might, at best, make the map smaller. "So that's the kind of thing we're looking at—what are the limits you can put on the analysis?" (Using true crime-style framings makes this statistical analysis much more exciting for her students, she says.)
Mostly, go through enough examples, and you begin to appreciate the sheer intractability of plants—how, by dint of being all around us, they worm themselves into our lives and our deaths. That tree you barely glance at every time you leave your house has been watching you much more closely. After you're gone, it might even help solve your murder.
The dodo is Mauritius's mascot. (Photo: Public Domain).
Correlation is not causation. For some reason, as many times as this phrase gets repeated, it doesn't seem to get less true. And sometimes, this human fallacy gets written into scientific record. Take the intriguing tale of the dodo tree.
On the small volcanic island of Mauritius just east of Madagascar live large hardwood trees with vines draping from their wide canopies. The trees go by several names including the tambalacoque tree, Sideroxylon grandiflorum, and, formerly Calvaria major—most famously, the "dodo tree."
In the late 1970s, botanist Stanley Temple hypothesized that the tree and the dodo bird—native to Mauritius and extinct since the 1680s—had been involved in a mutualistic relationship. The trees were prevalent in the forests 300 years ago, when dodos reigned over the island. In 1973, however, Temple found that there were very few juvenile trees on Mauritius. Ever since the death of the dodo, Temple believed, the tambalacoque trees were declining.
The theory sounded good. In the paper he published in the journal Science in 1977, Temple wrote that, "the dodo possessed a well-developed gizzard that contained large stone, which were used to crush tough food." These stones were perfect for crushing seeds from fruit-bearing trees. Like peach pits, the seeds in the fruit of tambalacoque trees have a tough, thick endocarp (the outer covering of a seed) that must be broken down somehow to germinate and grow.
Temple connected these facts, suggesting that the tambalacoque tree evolved the thick shell so it could protect the seed inside while it passed through a dodo's gizzard. Then after digestion, it would be easier for the seed to germinate. So no dodo, no tree.
To test his mutualism hypothesis, he conducted an experiment with turkeys, which also use gastroliths—small stones and sediment in their gizzards. He force-fed fresh tambalacoque seeds to 17 turkeys, and 10 successfully passed through the gizzard and were digested or regurgitated. He planted the 10 seeds and three germinated. In the conclusion of his paper, Temple wrote: “These may well have been the first Calvaria seeds to germinate in more than 300 years.”
Temple concluded that the dodo’s extinction led to the tambalacoque trees’ dismal numbers. But his mutualism study didn't quite check all the boxes.
“It’s a lovely story,” naturalist Gerald Durrell wrote in his book Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons. “But I’m afraid it’s got more holes in it than a colander.”
It didn't take long for Temple's paper to become an academic punching bag, as both his methods and his conclusions were flawed. It was discovered, for instance, that Temple didn’t plant non-ingested seeds to compare germination rates. He also failed to acknowledge a previous study that indicated that the seeds didn’t need to be worn down by a bird’s digestive tract to germinate.
Tambalacoque tree seeds have a thick outershell, similar to peach pits. (Photo: Peter Maas/CC BY-SA 3.0)
More people jumped in the fray. In 1979 Science published an editorial by A.W. Owadally, an official of the governmental forestry service of Mauritius, in which he criticized the facts in Temple’s paper and wrote it was unlikely that the dodo and the tree were even in the same area of the island. He also brought forth data from a 1941 survey of the forests that showed a good population of young tambalacoque plants that were certainly less than 75 to 100 years old. This meant that trees were able to germinate after the dodo became extinct.
Temple entered the debate and defended the reasoning behind his hypothesis by publishing a defense to Owadally's editorial. In the same issue of Science, Temple admitted that the tambalacoque tree-dodo mutualism was impossible to prove experimentally after the dodo’s extinction: “What I pointed out was the possibility that such a relation may have occurred thus providing an explanation for the extraordinarily poor germination rate in Calvaria. I acknowledge the potential of error in historical reconstructions.”
Other scientists have since proposed alternative reasons for the disappearance of the tambalacoque trees, suggesting that other animals that have since become extinct on the island, like the Mauritian giant tortoises, could have also helped distribute and germinate the seed.
It’s not impossible that the dodo was partially responsible for assisting tambalacoque tree seed germination 300 years ago. But Temple’s experiment lacked the evidence to prove the bird’s extinction was the cause of the dodo tree’s decline.
There is a silver lining to this story, though. Thanks to the controversy over Temple's research, the tree's plight got attention. Botanists now use different techniques to break down the seeds' outershell to aid germination, such as gem tumblers and polishers. The dodo bird may be long dead, but there are reports that the dodo tree population is rising.
In Finland, saunas are a big deal. And the country already has a lot of them—over two million, in fact, or one sauna for every 2.7 residents.
There, you go to the sauna to bond with friends, be alone with your thoughts, have a baby, or just sweat out your frustrations. And you'll find them all over, from the Finnish parliament to your own workplace.
So no one much batted an eye last year when Burger King opened a sauna at one of its franchises in Helsinki, according to the Associated Press. Don't worry, it's not for eating. Think of it more as a space to pregame.
“No, no, the sauna is for sweating it out, and our hamburgers taste all the better for it afterward,” a spokeswoman told the AP.
Makes sense, though using it might set you back a bit: it costs up to €300 for a group, or around $350. Whoppers, sadly, are not included.
Some people will naturally be attracted to raking those leaves into a huge pile, but the National Wildlife Federation has a really crazy idea: They say you should just leave those leaves where Mother Nature decided to leave them. Should we just leave leaves grounded?
Well, that's what The Farmers' Almanac recommends—they say leaves make really awesome compost. The 1844 edition of the almanac put it as such:
Prepare compost for a new year, by raking dead leaves, soil, sand, &c. in a heap, to turn over occasionally. Pour in brine, soap-suds, &c. from the house into it. Transplant still hardy kinds of flowering shrubs, suckers, &c. Clear the boarders from dead annuals, leaves, stumps, &c.; shelter the choice bulbs and double flowering plants.
(By the way, curious grammar nerds: "&c" is another way of saying "and continued" during an era when book space was a luxury.)
The advice the almanac offers today, though written a bit different, is essentially the same.
"Pound for pound, leaves contain twice the mineral content of manure," writes Robin Sweetser, The Farmer's Almanac's gardening blogger (it's so weird to say that!). "The huge amount of organic matter they offer can be used to improve soil structure. Leaf humus can lighten heavy clay soils and increase the moisture retention of dry sandy soils. No organic gardener should pass up this opportunity for a free soil amendment."
Zhu Bajie from Journey to the West. (Photo: Public Domain)
That seems like a good argument for keeping the leaves on the ground. But trees lose a lot of leaves—roughly 3,600 pounds in a tree's lifetime and 200,000 total leaves in a 60-year period, according to the Wisconsin County Forests Association.
While most of those leaves put nutrients back into the ground, the truth is that some people love raking, and for those who find the process enjoyable, it turns out that the rake has a lot of history.
If National Wildlife Federation President and CEO Collin O'Mara found himself face-to-face with Zhu Bajie, it's entirely possible that his organization might change its mind about raking—out of fear.
See, Zhu Bajie, one of the major characters in the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, is famous for carrying a massive, extremely heavy rake that he uses as a weapon. The heavy iron rake—best known as the jiǔchǐ-dīngpá, or nine-tooth rake—is often used in the story to kill demons, who when defeated have nine teeth-marks on their flesh from the weapon. Sounds like a rake you don't want to mess with.
"No other blade is worth a mention besides my rake, the sharpest weapon ever," Zhu says at one point in the novel.
(On the other hand, Zhu Bajie is something of a goof who largely serves as comic relief for the plot, so maybe O'Mara has no reason to worry about this man-pig!)
As you can imagine from this description, the rake is not a relatively new invention, unlike the lawn mower. Rakes have been around a long time, and while they're mostly associated with keeping lawns and gardens in tip-top shape. They're rarely (but sometimes) used as weapons, but often treated as annoyances in pop culture.
(If you ask me, they're also annoyances in real life.)
Traditionally made of materials such as bamboo and metal, the tale of the garden rake is one of slow evolution, one that can best be seen by spending a half an hour walking through old patents on Google. But you don't probably have half an hour, so let's go through some of the highlights:
Here's the earliest example of a garden rake shown in the U.S. patent system, dating back to 1874. The device includes what its creator, Edmund Brown, describes as "an automatically clearing attachment for iron tooth door-yard rakes, which shall remove all matter that may be collected between the teeth by simply raising the rake from the ground" in the patent document.
Ideas were slowly but surely evolving. This 1905 invention by Richard Franklin Lawson effectively combines the best elements of the snow shovel and the rake into a single device. To be totally unfair to him, it doesn't look like it's very good at either shoveling or raking, so it'd be time for him to go back to the drawing board if we weren't talking about something he did 110 years ago; we’re pretty sure that he's dead at this juncture.
The turning point in modern rake design may be thanks to the unsung hero and serial patenter Camille J. Rocquin. The New Orleans-based inventor held patents for at least fivedifferentkindsofrakes. Rocquin's rake designs—particularly the 1929 variation shown above—are similar to what you'd find in stores today if you were shopping for a metal rake.
The type of rake you're probably most familiar with, the molded plastic rake, didn't come about until the 1970s in its current shape. It was created by an inventor named Harold Eads, who worked for the Ames company—pretty much the biggest name in rakes. "An object of the present invention is to provide a rake which has all of the advantages of both steel tine rakes and bamboo rakes, without the disadvantages thereof," the 1972 patent document states. Considering we generally use plastic rakes nowadays, it appears that that objective was reached.
Not a prop from Nightmare on Elm Street, but the 2011 patent for a glove rake. (Photo: Google Patents US201203)
Honestly, we just put this glove rake patent in, despite the fact it only dates back to 2011, because we think it's hilarious. "It is the object of the present invention to provide a glove rake which truly acts as an extension of the wearer's hand, allowing the wearer to separately and independently rotate each of the fingers of the glove rake to perform a variety of different gardening, landscaping, and yard work tasks with maximum efficiency," the patent states. Like we said, hilarious.
One of the most interesting tales I discovered when I wrote about hand dryers last year was that of Oregon State Senator Chris Edwards, who led a lonely campaign to limit the amount of noise a hand dryer can emit.
Edwards had a strong personal reason for this—his son, who is autistic, couldn't handle the loud noise of the more powerful hand dryers, which is incredibly common in public places.
It makes sense that there are at least some people bugged by the noise of the hand dryers—and it's a frustration that translates to leaf blowers, which operate at roughly the same decibel level, between about 70 and 90db based on the model for both kinds of products. But since people tend to use leaf blowers in the open air and for longer periods, the frustration about hearing the blowing noise tends to cause a lot more problems in local communities.
And people are passionate about this stuff, especially when it comes to homeowners associations.
Just last fall, for example, a Georgia man was fined and threatened with jail time for reportedly overusing his leaf blower. He was told by a judge that he could only use his leaf blower over three 30-minute periods per week. He fought the fine, but lost.
“I walked away going, ‘what country are we in that they could put me in jail?’” Kim Treaster said.
In some corners of the internet, jail time is the least they'd do to Treaster. Just as an example, there's a website called "Nationwide Leaf Blower Ban," which describes leaf blowers as "horrific death devices." The anonymous author is so passionate about this issue that herunsfiveothersites which are described as anti-leafblower.
"So, it's a zero-sum game, giving the home or business owner a pristine driveway or lawn, while the dirt and debris has just been moved elsewhere in the neighborhood. That's not cleaning—it’s one residence making its mess the community’s problem," Weathers wrote in 2014.
On the plus side, leaf blowers are starting to get a little quieter—which should help you earn some friends at the next HOA meeting. Consumer Reports has a list of some of the least annoying leaf blowers, such as the Echo PB-250LN Handheld Gas Blower, whose volume tops out at a relatively quiet 65 dB.
“The less time you spend raking leaves, the more time you’ll have to enjoy the gorgeous fall weather and the wildlife that visits your garden."
That's the advice of National Wildlife Federation Naturalist David Mizejewski, who notes that raking, on top of being an annoying, inconvenient task that nobody really likes to do, also encourages people to put leaves into non-biodegradable plastic bags, after which they'll get put into landfills, taking up a solid 13 percent of the country's solid waste.
On the other hand, it's not just about your garden. Leaves can also pose a danger to pedestrians. In 2014, I was walking around the neighborhood with my wife when I stepped on a pile of leaves, under which was a large divot in the sidewalk. I twisted my knee and was laid up for two days.
So, to rake or not to rake? Maybe just go with your gut on this one.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
For 70 years, the mug pictured above held a secret: a necklace and gold ring, stored in a false bottom in a successful attempt to hide the valuables from the Germans during World War II.
Officials at the Auschwitz Museum announced this week that they had discovered the false bottom after doing some routine work on the artifact collection. Decades of deterioration had worked the false bottom free. Inside they found a necklace, as well this ring:
Officials said it's probably impossible to know who the owner is, since the mug doesn't appear to have any identifying features, though he or she was almost certainly an inmate at the concentration camp where over a million were slaughtered.
"The hiding of valuable items ... shows that the Jewish families constantly had a ray of hope," Piotr M. A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, said in a statement.
That hope, Cywiński said, was inspired by an intentional lie—if the Nazis could convince Jews that they were being relocated, instead of being sent to die, it made it more likely that they would bring their valuables with them to concentration camps, where they would be seized.
But this mug shows that the Nazis got far from everything. New valuables, in fact, are turning up all the time, Cywiński said.
