Record Roots The largest root system ever recorded was on a Finnish Pine tree with a total root length of 50 kilometres and over 5 million root tips. Self-Pruning Trees Over ten years, if a branch produced and kept only two side-shoots each years, the total number would be 20.000. But on a ten-year old birch only 2000 or so will survive To the Oak-Manor born A 1000 year old Oak in Wiltshire has been the nesting place of a family of Barn Owls since at least 1737.

This is the Prickly Pear, a tree sized cactus from the Galapagos islands in the Pacific. They have a unique flora and fauna, which inspired Darwin's theory of Evolution by natural selection.

Eucalyptus

Many countries have particular species, which have almost become national logo's. Australia has the Kangaroo and the Gum tree or Eucalypt. Three quarters of all trees in Australia and Tasmania are Eucalypts. There are more than 600 different species, which range from dwarf shrubs to to 350 feet giants in Western Australia. They are subtropical trees, well adapted to arid conditions, but some, like the the Snow Gum (E. niphophilia) will grow at 7.000 feet in the mountains of New South Wales.
Some Eucalypts can grow with astounding speed and so people in various parts of the world have tried to grow them with great hope and expectation, but many of these experiments have caused the poor Gum tree to be one of the most hated of introduced trees.
The Blue Gum was planted widely in California in the 1880's to help combat malaria. It can do this by its ability to soak up huge amounts of water and thus virtually drain the boggy, swampy places where mosquitoes thrive. However it also spread itself vigorously and greedily colonised good land. In the Himalayans foothills it was introduced as an answer to ever increasing deforestation and an urgent need for firewood. But the plantations dried up wells, leached the soil of nutrients and produce toxins which poison grazing land and crops. On top of that the leaves were useless as livestock fodder and were a bit of a disaster as a source of wood for cooking fires. The wood burns up too quickly to get a good bed of coals going and it infused house, food and people with the strong medicinal antiseptic smell of the gum. The tree was also enthusiastically embraced in Mediterranean countries as a fast growing coppice tree to provide wood pulp and paper, with grants from the European Union. And once more, the great vigour and thirst of the species threatened native flora and usurped precious water. The planting of Tasmanian Blue Gums has now been banned in Portugal, but when I went to visit friends there in the summer of 2002, I saw plenty of them (and could have smelled them if I had been blindfolded). There had been a huge forest fire in the area and the Eucalypts were regenerating fast covering whole hillsides. I've been told they can grow as much as 3 metres each year.
It did provide an answer to a great crisis in Ethiopia when its capital, Addis Ababa, was completely without fuel at the end of the 19th century. All the native timber had been cut and seedlings grazed.
The racy growth of the Gum tree provided a source of wood, which was better than having none at all. I have also heard that the Chinese have experimented with growing the tree with special fertilisers and there are rumours of trees taller than 470 feet, but I have no confirmation of this.
Eucalyptus has several remarkable features, quite apart from its talent for fast growth:

• Its flower buds are unique and put a new meaning to the term 'sex-pot'. They are little urn-shaped pots with a lid (including a knob which looks like someone's attempt at a lifting handle in a pottery night class). The flower has no petals. The stamens are folded inside the 'pot' and when they are ready for pollination, they unfold and push the lid off in the process. Insects may consider this a true 'honey-pot', as there is abundant nectar available.
• Eucalypts have two different kind of leaves, which can be very confusing to people not familiar with the tree. Its grey-green waxy evergreen leaves, which have a two year cycle, appear the first time round as small roundish disk-like leaves (called 'juvenile' leaves), which are later replaced by long narrow leaves, reminiscent of willow leaves. If fire destroys the leaves, the tree is also often able to grow a new set from dormant buds hidden beneath the fire-resistant bark.
• Most Eucalypts have a distinct swelling at the base of the tree, which is called a 'lignotuber'. This is a food store filled with carbohydrate reserves, which the tree can draw on if it looses its top in a bush fire or or other circumstances, to produce new shoots.
• Gum tree bark comes in a great variety of colours, looks very much like skin and tends to peel and flake creating lovely patterns. It also oozes its famous gum to protect itself when wounded and is highly fire-resistant. The Gum has been widely used as a medicine. This medicine is not suitable for internal use due to its powerful volatile oils. It has anti-septic and anti-inflammatory properties as well as muscle relaxing properties (especially useful when it is applied to the chest to help open up the airways).  It is used for cold and catarrhal conditions, bronchitis, chronic bronchitis, Emphysema, Asthma, Rhinitis, Sinusitis and similar. The application is usually by way of a chest rub (in some sort of diluted preparation) or as a steam inhalation. It has also been used for the eradication of lice and fleas.

This has turned into quite a lengthy item in comparison with others on this page, but I cannot resist adding the following quotation, which fired my imagination. I have never been to Australia and have only seen the landscape in films.  "Typical eucalyptus country, in South Australia for instance, is strangely like the ghost of a great English park. If you half shut your eyes those soft contours with grazing sheep, those huge hummocky broadleaf trees, here in a clump, there standing alone in massive maturity, suggest a Petworth or a Longleat, drained of all colour, condemned to everlasting summer, to bone-grey and bone-brown." Hugh Johnson "The International Book of Trees", Mitchell Beazley Ltd, London 1973

A tree with a mousy smell

Africa's sausage tree smells like a mouse; this compels bats to pollinate it.