Ancient bushes
2008 June 24, Tuesday, 12:00 — monadoFrom Chris Clarke’s Creek Running North:
On the floors of Mojave Desert valleys grows the creosote bush – Larrea tridentata. The resinous denizen of the hot lands sends out new aerial stems from the base of the plant. Little by little the plant expands, gaining a bit less than a millimeter in width each year. In time the old branches in the plant’s center die out, crowded and pressed for nutrients. The plant becomes a ring. In the southern Mojave there are oblong rings of creosote. One near Johnson Valley is twenty feet across on the short axis, sixty-five on the long. Dividing the rate of growth into the size of the ring, ecologists figure that “King Clone” is on the order of eleven thousand years old. The seed from which it grew predated all of recorded human history. King Clone was already older than the oldest bristlecone pine when the first pyramids were built.
Maybe they grow more quickly elsewhere.
















