If you’ve ever had the good fortune to walk among ancient trees like the giant sequoia of Yosemite Park (some over 2000 years old), or perhaps seen The Sisters grove in Lebanon (an olive tree grove estimated to be over 5000 years old), or even an old-growth forest, then you know that there’s something special about a grove of trees that has been on the planet for centuries, or longer.

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive project aims to reverse the loss of the great trees before they are gone. Founded by a family-run nursery in Michigan, the project first succeeded in creating clones of some of the oldest, largest trees that were felled over a century ago in Humboldt County, California. Some of the stumps of these trees still produce large basal sprouts. The Archangel team took cuttings of these sprouts and after thousands of attempts, were able to grow cloned offspring of what they call ‘champion’ trees.

Champions, for the people at Archangel, are those trees which lived for over 2,000 years before being felled, and which may have particular genetic characteristics which would allow them to survive all manner of harsh conditions. The non-profit group hopes to plant champion trees around the world to help combat deforestation and its effects through the addition of super trees into existing forests and near facilities that can study the trees as they grow. Given that more and more research points to plants and trees communicating with one another in previously undiscovered ways, perhaps it isn’t far-fetched to think that having particularly strong trees in a given ecosystem might improve that system’s overall robustness.

Thus far, the group has cloned 75 species of North American trees, and they are now expanding to include trees from other areas around the world.

In celebration of 2013 Earth Day, the group organized a global planting project in which thousands of volunteers planted 18 inch (45cm) cloned ancient redwood saplings in forests in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany.

The mission of the tree archive, according to their web site, is to “propagate the world’s most important old growth trees before they are gone; archive the genetics of ancient trees in living libraries; and reforest the Earth with the offspring of these trees to provide the myriad of beneficial ecosystem services essential for all life forms to thrive and to fight global warming.”

Whether or not champion trees have special genetic traits which make them particularly long-lived, this seems to be a remarkable and positive undertaking that honors the interdependence of ecosystems with the great trees that still live among them.

More:

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive website –

New York Times book review of The Man Who Planted Trees, a recently published book written by Jim Robbins on Archangel co-founder Dave Milarch. It is available for purchase on the Archangel website and the usual outlets.*

Co.Exist article – An Archive Of Ancient Tree DNA Will Help Us Clone The Ones We Destroy by Ben Schiller

Out of the Fog blog post – Reforesting Earth, one clone at a time by Chris Palmer

 

* There is another book by the same title which looks at famous tree planting advocates.