permaculture

["wenshidi@yahoo.co.uk" <wenshidi@yahoo.co.uk>]

Not strictly permaculture, but of interest to all tree lovers I am sure.

Chris

From Ancient Giants, Finding New Life to Help the Planet

FORT DICK, Calif. — Shooting skyward like a jagged knife, the giant stump in 
a cul-de-sac in this Northern California town is by all appearances dead and 
gone: ashen gray, hollowed by fire and sheared at about 40 feet by coastal 
winds or lightning.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Tree enthusiasts hope to mass-produce trees like this redwood in Jedediah 
Smith Redwood State Park in Northern California. More Photos »

But to Michael Taylor, a professional big-tree hunter, there are tantalizing 
signs of the stump’s potential.

“This snag is partially alive,” he explained, pointing to dozens of green 
sprouts on the trunk. “It has a lot of energy in it, and it will keep sending 
these up. They just can’t kill this thing.”

It is just those sprouts that lie at the heart of a plan hatched by a group 
of tree enthusiasts to clone — and then mass-produce — a collection of 
colossal redwoods, some of which date to before the birth of Jesus and can 
soar nearly 40 stories, the tallest living things on earth.

“We want to get the biggest, best genetic representations of the species,” 
said David Milarch, the co-founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. 
“And make millions and millions and millions of them.”

Mr. Milarch, who preaches his love for all things arboreal with an 
evangelical zeal, says that his mission is simple, if grandiose: to reforest 
the land with a variety of the most interesting tree species from around the 
world, and by extension, halt and reverse climate change.

“Everyone knows the problem, everyone knows the bad news,” said Mr. Milarch, 
a ruddy, jovial chain-smoker and a sixth-generation arborist. “This is the 
solution.”

That is debatable, of course. But what is certain is that Mr. Milarch’s 
approach is unique, if somewhat unorthodox. For while cloning has long been a 
staple of commercial and casual horticulture, trees, like humans, tend to 
reproduce most effectively when young.

“In a nursery setting, say something under five or 10 years, it’s really 
easy,” said Bill Werner, one of the group’s tree propagators. “But as they 
get older, material doesn’t seem to respond as well. It’s kind of a basic 
rule of biology — your grandmother doesn’t give birth to children.”

Cloning plants is nowhere near as difficult or sophisticated as cloning 
animals or other life forms. But it can be delicate work. Mr. Werner and 
other project propagators use various methods to clone two types of redwoods, 
coastal and giant sequoia. Those include so-called micropropagation, which 
basically uses tiny samples of plants, fed with heavy doses of synthetic 
growth hormones and nursed in a laboratory environment, to create genetically 
identical plants.

The method has long been used by horticulturalists to propagate plants, 
particularly finicky flora like orchids. In the case of the redwoods, Mr. 
Werner used small cuttings of sprouts and other plant material, including 
some cuttings from the upper reaches of giant sequoias. He slowly coaxed them 
into growing, and eventually, into growing roots. They were then transplanted 
to enriched soil, where they have continued to grow, now several inches high 
or more.

Mr. Milarch believes that this may be the first time that such ancient trees 
have been cloned in such a fashion. And while that could not be confirmed, 
William J. Libby, an emeritus professor of forestry and genetics at the 
University of California, Berkeley, said that Mr. Werner’s work was 
impressive nonetheless.

“What Bill has done is somewhere between what we thought was difficult and 
impossible,” said Mr. Libby, a consultant to the Archangel project. “And he 
moved it from impossible to difficult.”

Mr. Milarch’s efforts to capture the DNA of famous trees, which he has been 
at for nearly two decades, have raised some eyebrows in tree circles, as has 
his plan to sell the clones, something he says is necessary to finance his 
project. (The Archangel project has sought, but not yet been granted, federal 
nonprofit status, though it is recognized by the State of Michigan, where it 
is based.)

Connie Millar, a research scientist with the United States Forest Service, 
said it also did not necessarily track that the biggest, oldest trees had the 
best genes. “The longest lived trees could just be sitting on top of a water 
table, or sitting on especially rich soil,” said Ms. Millar, pointing out 
that the longest lived people are not necessarily the best genetically but 
rather those who get enough sleep, eat well and take care of themselves. 

Scott Steen, the chief executive of American Forests, the nation’s oldest 
conservation group, said he supported Archangel’s efforts to reforest; his 
organization, after all, has long been planting trees and is currently on a 
campaign to plant 100 million trees by 2020. And he agreed that the redwoods 
were “carbon sequestration superstars,” growing fast and soaking up carbon as 
they do.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Cloning Redwoods
Related

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      Times Topic: Trees and Shrubs

But he questioned whether the ancient redwoods were really the best type of 
tree to be cloning. “They’re not the kind of tree you can plant in your 
backyard unless you have a really big backyard,” Mr. Steen said. “And you 
can’t really line a city street with them.”

Ms. Millar echoed that, saying that it would be a better idea to plant “more 
cosmopolitan” trees than redwoods, able to live in more widespread and 
challenging areas.

Mr. Milarch says his group has “a global target list” of various trees he 
intends to clone and plant in a number of regions, and he defended his plan’s 
logic, saying that while “we are not climate change scientists,” the group 
had selected trees for “ longevity, survivability and their natural abilities 
to benefit and repair the environment.”

He added, “If we don’t archive these ancient survivors now, they won’t be 
available for scientific study in the future.”

Still, some scientists were also curious about whether the replicas would 
have the same genetic defenses against disease, bugs or environmental changes 
that evolution had developed in today’s forests.

“You don’t get genetic diversity with clones,” said Sean C. Lahmeyer, a plant 
conservation specialist at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, 
Calif. “You always want the variation that’s present in a natural population 
going on through sexual reproduction.”

For those far removed from biology class, redwoods do reproduce sexually, 
albeit not very sexily. Both the pollen and the ovules — sperm and egg — are 
contained in a single specimen, though in different parts of the tree. Pollen 
is usually blown to other trees and fertilizes their ovules. Seeds grow in 
cones, which themselves are then dispersed by wind, falling to the ground.

Not many manage to grow in that competitive environment, where challenges 
include disease, water and light. But those that do survive are wondrous.

“Any living being who walks up to a living thing that stands 400 feet in 
height,” Mr. Milarch said, “you feel pretty darn puny.”

The coastal redwoods can also be devilishly hard to find, hidden in remote 
areas in a largely rural stretch of Northern California and southern Oregon. 
(The giant sequoias, which the project also seeks to clone, are native to the 
western Sierra Nevada.) Botanists are known to be very protective of the 
exact location of some of the most impressive stands, for fear of sightseers 
damaging the trees’ habitat. And that is where Mr. Taylor comes in.

A former student at nearby Humboldt State University — “I remember trees more 
than I remember college” — Mr. Taylor, 44, has been stalking California 
forests for more than 25 years. He has discovered some whoppers, including 
the Hyperion, believed to be the tallest tree on the planet at 379 feet, 
which he found with another tree hunter in 2006.

For this project, Mr. Taylor has been looking both high and low, collecting 
basal sprouts from the stumps of old redwoods, which were heavily logged in 
the 20th century. Only about 5 percent of the native old-growth redwoods 
remain, experts estimate.

And the stumps that remain are often viewed as nuisances, chewing up property 
and stubbornly difficult to remove. Yet, for Mr. Taylor, they are potential 
bounty. Mr. Milarch pays him for each of the stumps he finds, including the 
one at Fort Dick, a town near the Oregon border just north of Crescent City, 
Calif.

Nicknamed the Big Snag, the stump here is about 25 feet in diameter and has 
probably been alive for 2,000 years, Mr. Taylor said. Circling its base, he 
saw dozens of sprouts, green life that might soon be coaxed into a new 
generation of mighty redwoods.

“This was a huge tree,” Mr. Taylor said. “And maybe it will be again.”