40 Fun Facts About Coniferous Forests

Which conifer species of foggy northern California includes Hyperion, the tallest known living tree?

Coast redwood Hyperion stands about 116 metres tall, yet it went unnoticed in a California park until two naturalists found it in 2006.

Which spirit gets its main flavour from the berry-like seed cones of the juniper, a conifer?

Gin is a shortened form of genever, a word related to the Dutch name for juniper, and the so-called berries are really cones with fleshy, fused scales.

Which golden gem, sometimes found with insects inside, is the fossilised resin of ancient trees?

Amber starts as soft, sticky resin, which is how small animals get caught in it. The largest known deposits lie around the Baltic, where conifers oozed it tens of millions of years ago.

Which sauce from Genoa in Italy traditionally gets its richness from the seeds of pine trees?

Pesto takes its name from a Genoese verb meaning to pound, because the pine nuts, basil and garlic were crushed together in a marble mortar.

Which tropical fruit owes its English name to a resemblance to the cones of a conifer?

Pineapple was the English word for a pine cone long before the fruit was known, and Columbus, who met the fruit in 1493, called it the pine of the Indians.

Which number pattern, famous from a puzzle about breeding rabbits, shows up in pine cone spirals?

Fibonacci numbers also turn up in the leaves on a stem and the flowering of an artichoke, a habit of nature that the astronomer Johannes Kepler was already pointing out four centuries ago.

Seeds flown around the Moon in 1971 grew into Moon trees planted for which American celebration?

The Bicentennial of 1976 was the occasion: most Moon trees went to state foresters to plant for it. Apollo 14 pilot Stuart Roosa had carried about 500 tree seeds in a small canister.

Which disease did Jacques Cartier's crew cure in 1536 with a tea of Canadian conifer needles?

Scurvy comes from a lack of vitamin C, and the needle tea that local Iroquoians showed the French explorer how to brew was later found to be rich in it.

Which conifer-clad mountain range in southwest Germany is the traditional home of the cuckoo clock?

Black Forest farmers made wooden cuckoo clocks in winter to top up their income. The range was almost stripped of trees by the 1850s and then replanted, mostly with spruce.

Which capital city is sent a Christmas tree by Norway every year as thanks for wartime help?

London stands the gift in Trafalgar Square. The tree comes from the city of Oslo and is usually 50 to 60 years old and more than 20 metres tall.

Which country holds most of the world's boreal forest, in a belt stretching from Karelia to the Pacific?

Russia contains the majority of this northern conifer belt. Canada comes next with about one third of it, enough to cover almost 60% of that country's land.

The narrow conical shape and drooping branches of northern conifers mainly protect the trees from what?

Heavy snow slides off the narrow crowns and downward-drooping limbs instead of piling up. The needles help in another way: their dark green colour soaks up more sunlight.

Which carrier, rather than bees or birds, do all conifers rely on to spread their pollen?

Wind carries the pollen of every conifer, and it usually scatters the seeds as well, which is why so many conifer seeds have wings.

Many lodgepole pine cones stay sealed for years until which natural event opens them and frees the seeds?

Wildfire heat opens the tightly closed cones, so the seeds fall onto newly cleared ground where sunlight can reach the forest floor again.

What do fallen conifer needles make the soil beneath a boreal forest, limiting which plants can grow there?

Acidic needles leach the soil as they break down, producing a type called podzol, and the forest floor often carries only lichens and some mosses.

Which giant sequoia, named after a Civil War commander, is the largest single-stem tree alive by volume?

General Sherman took the title in 1931 after being compared with the nearby General Grant Tree, a contest that made wood volume the accepted way to rank the size of trees.

Which conifer of the high American West includes Methuselah, a California tree more than 4,800 years old?

Bristlecone pine Methuselah grows about 3,000 metres up in the White Mountains, and for years its exact position was withheld for fear that visitors would damage it.

Which conifers, unlike most of their kind, shed every needle in autumn and dominate Siberia's forests?

Larches are among the few deciduous conifers: their needles turn yellow and fall each autumn, and the taiga of eastern Siberia is one vast larch forest.

Which timber term covers all conifer wood, even tough yew, while feather-light balsa falls outside it?

Softwood simply means wood from conifers and their relatives, so balsa counts as a hardwood despite being softer than most softwoods.

Conifers belong, along with cycads and the ginkgo, to which group of seed plants that never flower?

Gymnosperms take their name from the Greek for naked seed, because their seeds lack the protective outer covering that flowering plants wrap around theirs.

Which wild cat of northern conifer forests has tufted ears and broad paws for chasing snowshoe hares?

Lynx paws can carry almost twice as much weight as a bobcat's before sinking, and the cat's numbers rise and fall in step with the hares it depends on.

Which forest-floor animal of California's conifer woods did students vote in as UC Santa Cruz mascot?

Banana slug species are common in the forests around the campus, and the Pacific one can grow to 25 cm, making it the second-largest land slug in the world.

Which owl of the Pacific Northwest's old-growth conifer forests became the emblem of the timber wars?

Spotted owl protection made the bird an icon of the environmental movement, and logging is not its only threat: the barred owl, an invasive relative, has become its main competitor.

Which mountain bird of western North America buries thousands of pine seeds and finds them by memory?

Clark's nutcracker can hide as many as 98,000 seeds in one season, ferrying up to 150 at a time in a pouch under its tongue.

Which red, white-warted toadstool of fairy tales lives in partnership with the roots of spruce and birch?

Fly agaric is said to owe its name to an old household trick: it was powdered into milk to kill flies, a use Albertus Magnus wrote down before 1256.

Which solvent, long used to thin oil paints, is distilled from the sticky resin of pine trees?

Turpentine, or turps for short, is made from resin harvested from living trees, and besides thinning paint it goes into varnishes and the chemical industry.

Which medieval English weapon, used to great effect at Agincourt, was best made from the wood of the yew?

Longbow makers preferred yew, a conifer, though ash and elm also served, and a writer in 1388 called for a bow about 1.8 metres long.

In which sport do hitters smear sticky pine tar on the handle to improve their grip?

Baseball lets hitters use the tar on a bat, but not pitchers, who have sometimes been caught putting it on the ball in violation of the rules.

Which monumental carvings do Haida and Tlingit artists make from the trunks of giant conifers?

Totem poles take the first half of their name from an Algonquian word for a kinship group, and the figures on them may commemorate ancestors, legends or clan lineages.

Which insect, about the size of a grain of rice, has killed lodgepole forests across western North America?

Mountain pine beetle attacks succeed because the insect carries a blue stain fungus that stops the tree flushing it out with pitch, and mild winters let its numbers explode.

Which conifer, prized by Phoenician shipbuilders, stands in green at the centre of Lebanon's flag?

Cedar wood from Lebanon's mountains was traded across the ancient world, and Solomon is said to have procured it to build the Temple in Jerusalem.

Which Pacific Northwest conifer, named after a Scottish plant collector, topped 120 metres in old records?

Douglas fir honours David Douglas, who sent its seeds home to Britain in the 1820s, yet the name misleads: botanists do not count it as a true fir.

On the western slopes of which California mountain range do giant sequoias grow wild, and nowhere else?

Sierra Nevada groves hold all the wild trees, which are armoured with fibrous, furrowed bark that may be 90 cm thick at the base of the trunk.

Which country is home to Tāne Mahuta, the largest known living kauri conifer, in the Waipoua Forest?

New Zealand's giant is named after the Māori god of the forest, and nobody knows its age: estimates run from 1,250 to 2,500 years.

Which Canadian province holds the Great Bear Rainforest, a conifer realm of the white spirit bear?

British Columbia's rainforest covers 6.4 million hectares of Pacific coast, and its spirit bears are neither polar bears nor albinos: they are black bears born with a rare recessive white coat.

Which chemotherapy drug, used against ovarian and breast cancer, was first isolated from the Pacific yew?

Taxol is the brand name of paclitaxel, found by a US programme that screened plants for anticancer activity. Stripping the bark killed the trees, so the drug is now made from yew needles and cell cultures.

Which Australian conifer, often called a living fossil, was first found by canyon explorers in 1994?

Wollemi pine turned up in a New South Wales national park only because David Noble's group was hunting for new canyons. Once it proved easy to clone, it was planted around the world.

Which conifer of swamps in the American Southeast grows woody knees from its roots?

Bald cypress knees were once thought to carry oxygen down to the waterlogged roots, but trees whose knees are removed carry on thriving, so support is now the likelier job.

Which German word do ecologists use for the stunted, twisted conifers found at the upper limit of tree growth?

Krummholz joins the words for crooked and wood, and the low, deformed growth is shaped by continual exposure to fierce, freezing gales.

Which national forest, the largest in the United States, is named after a group of the Tlingit people?

Tongass spans 16.7 million acres of southeast Alaska, an expanse larger than 10 US states, and most of it is temperate rain forest.