Plants do not tell their own stories, so people tell them badly. Here are thirty-six that hold up: a tree cut down to learn its age, a bubble that did not ruin a country, a seed from a desert fortress that sprouted after two thousand years, and a twelve-year-old who worked out how to pollinate vanilla.
Every tile in a Trees and Plants game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
For generations a single acacia stood in the Ténéré region of the Sahara in Niger with no other tree for about 250 miles in any direction. Caravans navigated by it. Its roots reached water more than a hundred feet down. In 1973 a truck ran into it, and that was the end of the loneliest tree on the planet. The remains went to the national museum in Niamey, and a metal sculpture stands where it grew.
1 Source
In September 1994 David Noble, a field officer with the New South Wales parks service, was canyoning in Wollemi National Park northwest of Sydney and lowered himself into a narrow gorge. The trees at the bottom did not match anything he knew. They were a species known until then only from fossils, and botanists named it Wollemia nobilis after the park and after him. Roughly a hundred grew wild. Cuttings are now sold in garden centers worldwide.
2 Sources
Stuart Roosa had been a Forest Service smokejumper before he was an astronaut. On Apollo 14 in 1971 he carried a small canister of tree seeds in his personal kit, chosen from five species: loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood and Douglas fir. The Forest Service germinated them after the flight, and the seedlings were planted at courthouses, schools and parks, many of them for the Bicentennial. They grew up indistinguishable from ordinary trees.
2 Sources
From the attic of the secret annex in Amsterdam, Anne Frank could see one white horse chestnut in a neighboring garden, and she wrote about it in her diary three times. The tree outlived her by sixty-five years. Near the end it stood in an iron support frame, and on August 23, 2010 it came down anyway, frame and all, at more than 170 years old. Saplings grown from its chestnuts now stand at Anne Frank schools and other sites around the world.
2 Sources
Japanese has a word for them: hibakujumoku, the trees that lived through the atomic bombings of 1945. Many species survived in Hiroshima, but the ginkgos came through in numbers and became the best known. The blast burned their leaves, stripped their branches and scorched the bark, and green shoots pushed out the following spring. Ginkgo biloba is a living fossil whose lineage has changed little in around 200 million years. Mayors for Peace has since sent seeds from the survivors to 88 cities outside Japan, Oxford's botanic garden among them.
2 Sources
A Callery pear had been planted near the World Trade Center in the 1970s. In October 2001 workers found it in the plaza rubble: roots snapped, limbs broken, trunk blackened. At eight feet tall it went to a city nursery in the Bronx, where horticulturists tended it for most of a decade. In December 2010 it came back to the memorial plaza at about thirty feet, and it is known there simply as the Survivor Tree.
2 Sources
The story goes that a falling apple set Isaac Newton thinking about gravity at his family farm in Lincolnshire. The fullest account is William Stukeley's, written in 1752: on a warm day in 1726 he and Newton drank tea under apple trees in a Kensington garden, and Newton said the notion of gravitation had come to him in just such a moment. The variety at Woolsthorpe is a cooking apple called Flower of Kent. The tree there blew down in 1816, re-rooted where it lay, and still bears fruit.
3 Sources
The oak at Allouville-Bellefosse in Normandy has been hit by lightning more than once, and its trunk has stood hollow for centuries. In 1696 that struck the parish priest, Abbé du Détroit, as an opportunity rather than a defect. Two small chapels were fitted inside the trunk, one above the other, the lower dedicated to Our Lady of Peace. A staircase with a balustrade winds around the outside to reach the upper one. Since 1989 a steel pillar has helped hold the tree upright.
3 Sources
Most ancient trees are dated by counting rings or by guesswork. This one has paperwork. A cutting of the fig tree under which the Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment was carried from India to Sri Lanka by the nun Sanghamitta and planted in the royal gardens at Anuradhapura around 288 BC. The Mahavamsa chronicle records the journey, and the tree has been tended and venerated ever since, which makes it the oldest living tree with a recorded planting date.
2 Sources
Everyone knows the Dutch went mad for tulips in the 1630s and ruined themselves. The historian Anne Goldgar went through the archives and found a small trade, mostly merchants and skilled artisans; she could identify only 37 people who spent more than 300 guilders on bulbs, about a master craftsman's yearly wage. Prices did climb and then collapse in February 1637. She could not find anyone who went bankrupt, and the Dutch economy went on unaffected.
2 Sources
In 1862 Charles Darwin examined a Madagascan orchid whose nectar lay at the bottom of a spur nearly a foot long. In his book on orchid fertilization that year he argued that some moth must exist with a tongue to match. In 1903 Walter Rothschild and Karl Jordan described a hawkmoth that fit, and named it praedicta, the predicted one. No one watched the moth feed at the flower until 1992, when the German biologist Lutz Wasserthal saw it in Madagascar.
3 Sources
A red camellia reached Britain from China in 1804, brought over by John Middlemist, a nurseryman from Shepherd's Bush in London. Only two plants of the variety are commonly reported to survive. One grows in the conservatory at Chiswick House in west London, among 33 varieties in one of the oldest camellia collections under glass in Europe. The other stands at Waitangi in New Zealand, among camellias planted in the early 1830s and identified by genetic testing in the 1990s.
3 Sources
The picture most people carry is a whole field of sunflowers swiveling together all day long. Young plants do track the sun and swing back east overnight, but a 2016 study in Science showed that a sunflower stops moving once it matures and settles facing east. The reason is not sentiment. East-facing heads warm up earlier in the morning, and that warmth brings in more pollinating bees than a head turned west collects.
3 Sources
The belief that a poinsettia leaf can kill a child traces to a 1920 academic article on poisonous plants in Hawaii, which passed along an unconfirmed report of a two-year-old's death. A 1944 textbook repeated it, and the claim hardened into fact. In 1971 researchers at Ohio State fed 55 rats extraordinarily high doses of ground poinsettia and found no sign of toxicity at all. Poison control centers say no poisonous dose has ever been found, even at the equivalent of 500 to 600 leaves.
3 Sources
Two thousand cherry trees from Japan reached Seattle in December 1909 and Washington soon after. Department of Agriculture inspectors found them infested with insects and nematodes and diseased, and in January 1910 President Taft consented to have them burned. Tokyo sent a second gift: 3,020 trees of twelve varieties, grown and inspected with great care. They arrived in March 1912, and on the 27th Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda planted the first two beside the Tidal Basin.
1 Source
Joseph Paxton, head gardener at Chatsworth, was given a giant Amazonian water lily that had refused to flower at Kew, and in 1849 he got it to leaf and bloom. A contemporary engraving shows his eight-year-old daughter Annie standing on one of the leaves. The underside is a grid of radiating ribs braced by flexible cross ribs, and Paxton carried that structure into his glasshouse work and then into the Crystal Palace, which Queen Victoria opened in 1851.
3 Sources
A wild dog rose climbs the apse of the cathedral at Hildesheim in Germany, and the legend behind it reaches back to the founding of the diocese around 815. A bombing raid in March 1945 destroyed the cathedral, and the rose burned with it and lay buried under the rubble. Eight weeks later, 25 new shoots pushed up from the roots. To the survivors it looked like a miracle. The rose still grows against the wall, a symbol of the diocese and of the whole town.
2 Sources
Francis Masson began at Kew as an under-gardener and sailed on Cook's second voyage as a plant collector, sending home more than 500 newly discovered species from South Africa. Joseph Banks named one of them Strelitzia, after Queen Charlotte, wife of George III and a duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who spent years at Kew. The epithet reginae means "of the queen." Everyone else calls it bird of paradise.
1 Source
The giant sequoia named General Sherman, in Sequoia National Park, is the largest single tree in the world by volume: the Park Service puts it at roughly 52,500 cubic feet of wood. It stands about 275 feet tall and measures 36.5 feet across at the base, with a circumference at ground level of 102.6 feet. It is not the tallest tree in the world, and it is not the oldest. Its record is sheer bulk.
1 Source
Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor found a coast redwood in Redwood National Park on August 25, 2006, and a tape drop measured it at 115.55 meters, just over 379 feet. It kept growing: Guinness recorded 116.07 meters in 2019 and certifies it as the tallest living tree. There is no trail to Hyperion. So many people bushwhacked in, trampling the forest floor along the way, that the park closed the area; a hiker caught there now faces a $5,000 fine and six months in jail.
3 Sources
Spread across 106 acres of the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, more than 47,000 aspen trunks share a single root system and a single set of genes. Together they are one organism, named Pando, and generally described as the largest and heaviest known organism, at something like 13 million pounds. It is not thriving. Deer and elk browse the young shoots, so across most of the grove old trunks are dying without replacements coming up behind them.
3 Sources
The titan arum of Sumatra grows the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world. What looks like one six-to-eight-foot flower is really a spike of many tiny flowers wrapped in a single frilled sheath, and the plant needs years of stored energy to raise it. The smell is the point: rancid, rotten and meaty, pitched at insects that feed on dead animals. The whole performance is over in roughly a day and a half.
1 Source
A coconut is a modest thing by comparison. The coco de mer palm grows wild only in the Seychelles, in patches of primary rainforest on deep, granite-rich soil, and its seed holds the world record for both size and weight: 40 to 50 centimeters long and 10 to 25 kilograms, which at the top of the range is around 55 pounds. That is the seed alone, before the husk and flesh around it are counted.
1 Source
One orchid capsule can hold hundreds of thousands to millions of seeds, each barely more than an embryo in a thin coat. They carry no endosperm, the food store that gets an ordinary seedling through its first days. An orchid seed that lands somewhere promising still cannot start on its own: it has to be found by the right soil fungus and fed by it. That is why orchid seed does not simply come up in a pot.
1 Source
Guinness gives the record for fastest growing plant to bamboo, with certain species measured at up to 91 centimeters, about 35 inches, in a single day. Kept up around the clock, that works out to roughly an inch and a half an hour, fast enough that a patient watcher could see the difference between breakfast and dinner. Guinness also states the same figure another way: 0.00003 kilometers per hour.
1 Source
In a churchyard at Santa María del Tule in Oaxaca stands a Montezuma cypress with a trunk so broad that botanists long argued it had to be several trees grafted together. In 1990 a team led by Gustav Hall ran enzyme tests on leaf samples taken from each of the trunk's eight major segments. The results fit one genetic individual. It is not a tall tree for its bulk, and it is regularly cited as having the largest girth in the world.
1 Source
Welwitschia lives in the coastal desert of northern Namibia and southern Angola, where a year's rain can amount to less than 50 millimeters. Each plant puts out exactly two leaves and then never makes another. The pair simply keeps growing from the base for the whole life of the plant, splitting and fraying in the wind until it looks like a heap of straps. Those leaves can last several thousand years, the longest-lived in the plant kingdom.
1 Source
Vanilla is an orchid, and outside Mexico it had no pollinator, so vines planted on Réunion flowered year after year and set nothing. In 1841 a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond, working in Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont's garden, showed him two pods on a vine that had never fruited. The hand method Edmond worked out is still how vanilla is pollinated. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848 and he was freed, but he died poor.
3 Sources
In February 1933 a Wisconsin farmer drove two hundred miles through a blizzard to Madison with a dead heifer, a milk pail of blood that would not clot, and tufts of the spoiled sweet clover hay he had been feeding his cattle. Karl Paul Link's lab at the university worked out that mold fuses two molecules of a harmless clover compound into an anticoagulant. A more potent synthetic relative reached the shelves as rat poison in 1948, named warfarin after the university's research foundation. Doctors prescribe it to this day.
3 Sources
Edward Stone, a clergyman in Oxfordshire, tasted a piece of willow bark and found it as bitter as the cinchona bark used against fever. He guessed the two might work alike, dried and powdered willow bark, and gave measured doses to about fifty people suffering from agues. His account was read to the Royal Society in 1763. Willow bark contains salicin, and it took another sixty-five years for a chemist to isolate the compound in pure form.
2 Sources
In 1876 Henry Wickham gathered about 70,000 rubber tree seeds near Santarém in the Brazilian Amazon and shipped them to Kew. Only a couple of thousand germinated, but the seedlings went out to Britain's colonies in Asia, among them Ceylon, and by 1914 Brazil's monopoly on rubber had collapsed. Accounts still differ sharply on what to call the episode: a feat of imperial botany, or straightforward theft.
3 Sources
Fertilize tall wheat heavily and it falls over under the weight of its own grain, which wastes the fertilizer and the harvest. Working in Mexico from the 1940s, Norman Borlaug bred dwarf varieties with stems short and stiff enough to hold a full head upright. Mexico was producing enough wheat to feed itself by 1956. In the 1960s the same varieties went to India and Pakistan and harvests climbed sharply. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
2 Sources
Corn's wild ancestor is a Mexican grass called teosinte, and it does not look the part: a small spike bearing five to fifteen kernels, each sealed in a stony casing. George Beadle argued that this was the ancestor of maize and was doubted for years, until his own breeding experiments and later genetics settled it his way. Farmers in the Balsas River valley began selecting it about 9,000 years ago, and the oldest maize remains found there run to roughly 8,700 years.
3 Sources
Cotton was going into uniforms and into explosives, and there was not enough left for bandages. Sphagnum moss was free in the bogs of Britain and Canada, held up to twenty-two times its weight in fluid, and was acidic enough to slow bacteria. Volunteers went out on organized moss drives to gather it, many of them women and children, and the moss was cleaned and sewn into dressings. By 1918 Britain was sending a million dressings a month to hospitals in Europe, Egypt and Mesopotamia.
1 Source
Until the middle of the twentieth century the export banana was the Gros Michel. A soil fungus that causes Panama disease moved through the plantations, and because every plant was a clone of every other, there was no resistant individual anywhere to breed from. Growers switched to the Cavendish, which shrugged off that strain of the fungus. The Cavendish is a clone too, and a newer strain of the same fungus is now spreading through growing regions.
2 Sources
Antonio López de Santa Anna, the former Mexican president, was living in exile in the United States with a supply of chicle, the sticky white latex that seeps from a cut sapodilla tree. He thought it might sell as cheap rubber. Thomas Adams tried to vulcanize it and failed. Then he boiled a batch, rolled it into pieces by hand, and put them in a local drugstore, where the lot sold out in hours. In February 1871 Adams patented the gum itself, as a new article of manufacture.
3 Sources