Valarie Trouet at Aeon Magazine:
Adonis is not the only tree with stories to tell, nor is it the oldest. Many of the world’s longest-living trees grow in the Americas. In Chile, El Gran Abuelo, an alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides), was tree-ring dated in 1993 to be 3,622 years old. In the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, the giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) can live to be more than 3,200 years old. The world’s oldest known trees, the bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva), grow just east of there, high up in California’s White Mountains. The stunted and twisted bristlecones are perseverance personified. Methuselah, the oldest-known living bristlecone, aptly named after the legendarily long-lived biblical patriarch, germinated in 2833 BCE. It predates the Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest Egyptian pyramid, by two centuries. Like the Smolikas landscape, the dry, exposed slopes in the White Mountains empower bristlecone pines to persevere for millennia, but they also warrant the preservation of wood after the trees eventually expire. The barren landscape is inhospitable to wood-decaying fungi and insects, and the plant groundcover is too scarce to sustain wildfires. The resinous remains of bristlecone trees can lie on the limestone rocks for millennia.
more here.
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