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Putting Methuselah in the Shade – World’s Oldest Trees
Ever since I first read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator as a bedtime story to my daughter nearly two decades ago, I’ve always thought of the Bristlecone Pine that grows somewhere in Nevada as the oldest tree in the world. In the story, Willy Wonka tells the boy Charlie that the oldest living thing in the world is this pine tree. Willy Wonka says the tree is more than 4,000 years old, but Wikipedia shows a photograph of a suitably gnarled tree and states it is actually 5,065 years old.
Bristlecone Pine in Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
Of course there are other contenders like the magnificent Hundred Horse chestnut (Castagno dei Cento Cavalli) in Sicily, reputedly 2-4,000 years old, and other Bristlecone pines from the same forest. Apparently there is yet another that is claimed to be (an impossible-sounding) one million years old. This is the Pando, in Utah, a collective of aspen tree trunks, all genetically linked by a common root system that has apparently survived a million years.
The Stu-pandous Pando trees of Utah, with a shared common root
To me, this sounds like cheating, even if the root system’s age is impressive by any standards. Not to be outdone, the magazine Nature published an article in 2003 that claims the gingko tree is a living fossil. Recent finds show that gingko species have remained unchanged for the past 51 million years and show remarkable similarity to species that lived during the Jurassic period, hobnobbing with dinosaurs, 170 million years ago.
For more by this author, see his Amazon page here.
Lilacs and Chestnuts in Bloom: springtime in Vienna
Strolling through the streets of Vienna at this time of the year is a good opportunity to admire lilacs and chestnuts in bloom. A note for the (happily) increasing number of readers of this blog from countries outside the temperate zone: the nuts that grow on these trees in the autumn are not edible. These trees are properly called Aesculus Hippocastum, also known as horse chestnuts, and not even remotely related genetically to those that produce the edible variety. Edible chestnuts, though similar in appearance to horse chestnuts, grow on several species of trees that belong to the beech family. 
Incidentally, while checking the background for the above, I came across an image for what is reputedly the largest tree in the world (in terms of girth, not height). It is a sweet (edible) chestnut tree called the Hundred Horse Chestnut, estimated to be 4000 years old, located near Mount Etna in Sicily. Its multiple trunks have a circumference of nearly 200 feet (60 meters). There are conflicting claims as which exactly is, or was, the world’s tallest tree, but as a species, the tallest four are the Redwoods and Douglas Firs of California and Oregon, closely followed by Eucalyptus, Sitka Spruce and Giant Sequoia. Apart from the tallest Australian Eucaplytus, all the other top four are found on the west coast of the United States. 
aviott 