Out
On A Limb / January 2006
Trees of Life
The Champion Tree Project International presented offspring from two of the oldest-known trees in the world to the Washington National Cathedral and the National Institutes of Health at the Land Development Breakthroughs Conference at the Washington D.C. Convention Center in December. Champion Tree Project International breeds and clones the world’s oldest and largest trees in hopes of compiling a living archive of the genes that give them their longevity.
A seedling from the 4,770 year old “Methuselah” Bristlecone Pine, the oldest-known living conifer “Christmas Tree” on Earth, is a gift to the Washington National Cathedral that will eventually be planted on their 59 acres of grounds. Dede Petri, President of the All Hallows Guild, the support organization responsible for beautifying the cathedral grounds, says, “We are most interested in adding a “Methuselah” pine to our collection, not only because of its wonderful horticultural attributes and history, but also because of its unmistakable relevance to this sacred place. It has a biblical reference and is therefore of educational and instructional value to the children.”
The Methuselah pine grows at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the White Mountains near the California-Nevada border. It is named after a Hebrew patriarch mentioned in Genesis, who is the embodiment of longevity. Project participants got special permission from the U.S. Forest Service to collect cones from Methuselah, one of which yielded the National Cathedral’s seedling. ”It’s older than the great pyramids, older than Stonehenge,” project President David Milarch said of the 4,770-year-old “Methuselah” bristlecone pine whose cone bore the seedling the cathedral will receive. “When Christ walked the earth it was already 2,700 years old.”
Cathedral staff hope to plant the seedling in a special grove of trees used by students at its elementary school.
The first successful clone of the “Hippocrates Tree” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was also announced. The cutting for the “Hippocrates Tree” was given to the U.S. Ambassador in Athens, Greece in July 1960, cared for in the Glenn Dale Nurseries of the Agriculture Research Center in Maryland and formally presented to the National Library of Medicine by the Ambassador of Greece to the United States. The cutting is from the original tree (platanus orientalis) under which Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, is said to have conducted his classes some 25 centuries. The gift to the United States from the Greek ambassador has been growing on the NIH grounds in suburban Bethesda, Md, since 1961. The tree has not been well lately, but the clone will join it on the NIH property.
The NIH has implemented a state-of-the-art Urban Forest Conservation Plan which serves as a model for watershed restoration. According to Lynn Mueller, the NIH chief of grounds maintenance and landscaping, “The reforestation of the creek and upland areas here is unique for a government agency facility and can serve as a model for other institutional settings.”
Champion Tree Project International (CTPI) has a mission to lead society towards sustainability by preserving, propagating and planting a living legacy of Champion Trees –the largest and oldest individual trees of their species. CTPI is focusing on using exact genetic duplicates of outstanding individual trees to restore watersheds across the country to demonstrate the importance of preserving the biodiversity of old growth trees to rebuild sustainable community forests of the future.
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Femme Fair 2006
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