150 Fun Facts About Trees

What process do trees use to convert sunlight into energy?

Photosynthesis uses sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to build sugars; the oxygen that trees release is a by-product, split off from the water rather than the carbon dioxide.

What term describes trees and shrubs that seasonally shed all their leaves, usually in autumn?

Deciduous, from the Latin for 'falling off': trees such as oaks and maples drop their leaves to save water and get through winter, then have to regrow all their foliage in spring.

A California bristlecone pine more than 4,600 years old is named after which biblical figure?

Methuselah takes its name from the Bible's longest-lived man, said to have reached 969; the pine's exact spot in the White Mountains has long been kept quiet to protect it from damage.

What part of a tree primarily transports water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves?

Xylem carries water and dissolved minerals up from the roots; as a tree thickens, its older xylem cells die and harden into the heartwood that holds the trunk up.

Which common product is primarily made from wood pulp?

Paper was made mostly from rags until the 1840s, when a shortage of them pushed inventors on both sides of the Atlantic to pulp wood instead.

What science dates a tree's growth rings to the exact year they formed?

Dendrochronology was founded by Andrew Douglass, an astronomer who began collecting tree rings in the hope that their widths would record the sunspot cycle.

Which species includes the tallest living trees on Earth, reaching over 115 metres?

Coast redwood grows only in a narrow strip along the Pacific coast of California and Oregon, where summer fog drips from the crowns and keeps the trees moist through the dry season.

General Sherman, the largest known living single-stem tree by volume, is which species?

Giant sequoia: General Sherman, in California's Sequoia National Park, holds about 1,487 cubic metres of wood, and in 2021 firefighters wrapped its base in protective foil as a wildfire closed in.

Which living plant tissue carries sugars made in the leaves out to the rest of the tree?

Phloem is the inner layer of the bark, which is why girdling, cutting a ring of bark right around the trunk, starves the roots of sugar and kills the tree.

Which evergreen tree's thick outer bark is stripped every nine to twelve years without harming it?

Cork oak bark grows back after every stripping, so a tree that can live for two centuries is harvested again and again, mostly to make wine stoppers.

Genomic analysis suggests the baobab genus originated on which island, home to six of its eight species?

Madagascar: six of the eight Adansonia species are endemic to the island, and a 2024 genome study in Nature traced the genus's origin there, with later dispersal to mainland Africa and Australia.

Pando, often called the world's heaviest single organism, is a Utah clonal colony of which tree?

Quaking aspen: Pando's roughly 47,000 stems are one genetic individual joined by a single root system in Utah's Fishlake National Forest, where fences now keep deer and elk off its new shoots.

Six ginkgo trees famously survived which 1945 event while growing 1 to 2 km from its centre?

The Hiroshima atomic bomb charred six ginkgos growing 1 to 2 km from the blast, yet they soon recovered and are still alive, signposted today as hibakujumoku, survivor trees.

The banyan fig is the national tree of which country?

India's national tree is the banyan, whose branches drop aerial roots that thicken into new trunks, so that one tree can in time look like a dense thicket.

Hyperion, the tallest known living tree, shares its name with which kind of Greek mythical figure?

Titan: in Greek myth Hyperion was the Titan father of the sun, moon and dawn; the tree was found in 2006, and the park later closed the area because visitors had trampled the plants around its base.

Which Canadian province produces more than two-thirds of the world's maple syrup?

Quebec's producers keep a strategic reserve of syrup, and over several months in 2011 and 2012 thieves drained nearly 3,000 tonnes from it, worth about C$18.7 million.

'True cinnamon', Cinnamomum verum, takes its trade name Ceylon from which country?

Sri Lanka was called Ceylon until 1972, and Cinnamomum verum is native to the island; most cinnamon in international commerce is actually cassia from other Cinnamomum species, all of it harvested as inner bark.

Which Caribbean tree, the 'little apple of death', blisters skin if you stand under it in rain?

Manchineel (Hippomane mancinella), Spanish 'manzanilla de la muerte': its milky sap blisters skin, so rain dripping through the canopy burns. Every part is toxic, yet its roots stabilise Caribbean beaches and Florida lists it as endangered.

The Major Oak, an ancient tree declared dead in 2026, stands in which English woodland?

Sherwood Forest's Major Oak, by legend the hideout of Robin Hood and his outlaws, failed to leaf in 2026 after years of decline; its trunk will be left standing as a home for wildlife.

Old Tjikko, a clonal spruce roughly 9,550 years old, grows in which country?

Sweden: Old Tjikko's roots on Fulufjället mountain were carbon-dated to about 9,550 years, though its trunk is only a few centuries old, and its discoverers named it after their late dog.

Jōmon Sugi, a cedar possibly over 7,000 years old, grows on which Japanese island, whose forests inspired Princess Mononoke?

Yakushima: the tree drew wide notice only in the 1960s, and its discovery spurred moves to protect the island's ancient cedar forests.

The Tree of Ténéré, once the most isolated tree on Earth, was knocked down in 1973 by what?

A truck: in 1973 a reportedly drunk Libyan driver struck the lone acacia, a landmark so well known that it was marked on 1:4,000,000 maps; its remains now stand at the national museum in Niamey.

The Sycamore Gap tree, illegally felled in 2023, stood beside which ancient structure?

Hadrian's Wall: the sycamore stood in a dip beside the wall and appeared in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; two men were jailed in 2025 for felling it, and its stump has since sent up new shoots.

The Wollemi pine, known only from fossils until 1994, grows wild in which country?

Australia: the only wild Wollemi pines grow in a gorge whose location is kept secret, and during the 2019–20 bushfires specialist firefighters ran an operation to irrigate and save the grove.

The dragon blood tree, named for its red resin, is the national tree of which country?

Yemen: the tree grows wild only on Socotra, a Yemeni island group in the Arabian Sea, and its dark red resin was prized across the ancient world as 'dragon's blood', used as both a dye and a medicine.

El Árbol del Tule, the tree with the world's stoutest trunk, grows in which country?

Mexico: El Árbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress in a church's grounds in Oaxaca, is so broad that it was long thought to be several trees, until DNA tests showed it is a single individual.

Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus spread from tree to tree by which insects?

Bark beetles: elm bark beetles of the genus Scolytus carry spores of the Ophiostoma fungus from breeding galleries in dead elm bark to healthy trees; the disease is named for the Dutch scientists who identified it from 1921.

The Angel Oak, a sprawling southern live oak, stands near which US city?

Charleston: the Angel Oak, on nearby Johns Island, owes its name to no angel but to Justus and Martha Angel, whose estate it grew on; the city has owned the tree since 1991.

Eucalyptus deglupta, with its multicoloured peeling bark, is the only eucalypt that usually grows in which habitat?

Rainforest: this rainbow eucalyptus of the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea sheds its orange-tinted bark in strips, and the layers beneath show as streaks of green, red, orange, grey and purple.

Protestants in Livonia and which other country developed the custom of bringing decorated Christmas trees indoors?

Germany's early trees were hung with apples, wafers and sweets, and it was Queen Victoria's German-born husband, Prince Albert, who made the tree fashionable in Britain in the 1840s.

The Japanese word bonsai literally means what?

Pot planting: bonsai joins bon, a tray or shallow pot, and sai, planting; the art grew out of China's older penjing, brought home by Japanese envoys and Buddhist students from the 6th century on.

Salicin, the precursor of aspirin, is found in the bark of which tree?

Willow: salicin is named after Salix, the willow genus, and it was chemists' work on such bark compounds during the 19th century that led Bayer to launch aspirin in 1899.

Which country produces about half of the world's cork each year?

Portugal protects the trees by law: they cannot be cut down, and even felling an old, unproductive one needs special permission from the government.

What is the winged, spinning fruit of maples, ashes and elms called?

Samara: a dry, winged fruit that spins as it falls, carrying a single seed away from the parent tree; maples bear paired samaras nicknamed helicopters, while ashes and elms bear single ones.

Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, founded a tree-planting movement in which country?

Kenya: Maathai began the Green Belt Movement there in 1977 to counter deforestation, and it has mobilised women to plant tens of millions of trees.

The tree whose latex is the main source of natural rubber is native to which region?

The Amazon basin: Hevea brasiliensis grows wild there, but some 70,000 seeds that Henry Wickham took to Kew in the 1870s founded the Southeast Asian plantations that came to dominate rubber production.

America's first Arbor Day, when an estimated one million trees were planted in 1872, was held in which state?

Nebraska's settlers lacked trees for windbreaks, fuel, building and shade, so newspaper editor J. Sterling Morton proposed a tree-planting day, with prizes for whoever planted the most.

The olive was first cultivated between 6,000 and 4,000 BC, most likely in which region?

The Levant, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, is where the olive became one of the first fruit trees to be domesticated; trade and migration then carried it west around the whole sea.

The cacao tree's genus name Theobroma comes from Greek meaning what?

Food of the gods: Theobroma joins the Greek theos, god, and broma, food, and theobromine, the stimulant in chocolate, was in turn named after the genus.

Botanically, the fruit of the coconut palm is classified as what?

A drupe: the coconut has a fibrous husk (mesocarp) around a hard stony shell (endocarp) enclosing the seed, the same structure as a peach or olive, so botanically it is a drupe rather than a true nut.

Which trees survive tidal saltwater using salt filters and aerial roots called pneumatophores?

Mangroves breathe through pneumatophores, roots that stick up out of the mud like straws, and red mangroves keep salt out with roots so impermeable that they filter it from the seawater.

A 2015 study estimated the number of trees on Earth at roughly how many?

3 trillion: a 2015 study in Nature counted about 3.04 trillion trees, nearly eight times the earlier estimate of 400 billion, and found the total has fallen by about 46% since human civilisation began.

Which biome, also called boreal forest, is the world's largest land biome?

Taiga, or boreal forest, spans Canada, Scandinavia and Russia and holds about 29% of the world's forest cover, which makes it the largest land biome; its conifers race to grow in the short northern summer.

Bacteria in the root nodules of alder trees capture which element from the air?

Nitrogen: Frankia bacteria in the alder's root nodules fix it from the air, so the tree can colonise poor, bare ground and leaves the soil richer for the trees that follow.

Wattieza, among the earliest known trees some 385 million years ago, reproduced by what instead of seeds?

Spores: Wattieza stood 8 metres or more tall, with fronds instead of leaves, and looked like a modern tree fern even though the two are unrelated.

Which woodland practice cuts a tree down to near ground level so that its stump regrows a crop of new stems?

Coppicing leaves a living stump, called a stool, that sends up new poles to be cut again years later; pollarding does the same higher up the trunk, out of reach of grazing animals.

The Khasi people of Meghalaya grow living root bridges from the aerial roots of which tree?

The rubber fig: Khasi and Jaintia villagers guide its aerial roots across a stream along halved areca palm trunks, and a bridge can take up to 15 years to finish.

Kalpavriksha, the divine tree that rose from the churning of the ocean of milk in Hindu tradition, grants what?

Wishes: the Kalpavriksha is said to have risen from the churning of the ocean alongside Kamadhenu, the divine cow, and Indra, king of the gods, carried it off to his paradise.

A 2004 study of the world's tallest trees found that what ultimately limits how tall a tree can grow?

Water supply: gravity and friction leave the highest leaves so short of water that growth stalls, which the study said caps tree height at about 122 to 130 metres.

Centurion, a mountain ash about 100 metres tall and the tallest known flowering tree, grows where?

Tasmania: climbers taped Centurion at 99.6 metres in 2008 and a laser survey gave 100.5 in 2018; it stands in a small patch of old forest that loggers and bushfires happened to miss.

New Zealand's giant Tāne Mahuta is named after the Māori god of forests and what else?

Birds: in Māori tradition Tāne is the god of forests and of birds, the son who forced his parents, sky and earth, apart; the giant tree named for him stands in Northland's Waipoua Forest.

Which country's flag shows a green cedar tree at its centre?

Lebanon wrote the flag into its constitution in December 1943, and a 1990 amendment went further, laying down that the whole cedar must be drawn entirely in green.

Which genus of conifers is unusual in dropping all its needles every autumn?

Larch sheds every needle each autumn, yet it thrives where winters are hardest: larches dominate the forests of Siberia, and the Dahurian larch grows farther north than any other tree.

Ginkgo biloba, sole survivor of a 290-million-year-old order, has what common name?

Maidenhair tree: the name comes from the fan-shaped leaves, which resemble the leaflets of maidenhair fern; Ginkgo biloba sits alone in its own division, Ginkgophyta, and its closest living relatives are the cycads.

The cancer drug paclitaxel (Taxol) was first extracted from the bark of which tree?

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia): paclitaxel was isolated from its bark in 1971 after a 1962 screening sample, and because stripping the bark killed the tree, supply stayed scarce until semisynthesis from yew needles arrived in the 1990s.

Quinine, long the only effective malaria treatment, comes from the bark of which trees?

Cinchona seeds collected in the Andes in 1865 were sold to the Dutch, and the plantations they raised in Java took over the world's quinine supply from South America.

Which resin, one of the Magi's gifts, is tapped from Boswellia trees?

Frankincense oozes as a milky sap when the bark of a Boswellia tree is cut, then hardens in the air into the 'tears' that are gathered by hand and burned as incense.

Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 raft Kon-Tiki was built from logs of which tree?

Balsa: Heyerdahl's crew built the raft from balsa logs in Peru and sailed it for 101 days across the Pacific before it smashed into a reef at Raroia; all six men got home safely.

Which dense, self-lubricating wood was used for ship propeller-shaft bearings, including on USS Nautilus?

Lignum vitae is Latin for 'wood of life', a name earned by its resin's use in medicine; it comes from slow-growing Guaiacum trees, every species of which is now listed under CITES as potentially endangered.

Nutmeg and which other spice both come from the fruit of the Myristica fragrans tree?

Mace is the crimson aril around the seed, flattened and dried for 10 to 14 days until it turns pale orange or tan.

Cloves are which part of the Syzygium aromaticum tree?

Unopened flower buds: cloves are picked once the buds have turned from pale green to bright red, before they can open, then dried; in Indonesia, their native home, they are also rolled into kretek cigarettes.

The coco de mer palm, which bears the plant kingdom's largest seed, grows wild where?

Seychelles: the palm grows wild only on the islands of Praslin and Curieuse; its nuts were once thought to drift across the ocean, but a live one is too dense to float, so the palm never spread.

Which is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, growing up to 90 cm long?

Jackfruit grows straight from the trunk and large branches and can weigh tens of kilograms; canned, its flesh is now marketed as a meat alternative.

Goats famously climb argan trees to eat the fruit and leaves in which country?

Morocco: goats climb high into argan trees to eat the fruit, and in some areas the hard nuts they leave behind are gathered up to be pressed for argan oil.

The monkey puzzle tree, Araucaria araucana, is the national tree of which country?

Chile's national tree is said to owe its English name to a visitor in Cornwall around 1850, who remarked that climbing it would puzzle a monkey.

The dawn redwood, known only as a fossil until the 1940s, was found alive in which country?

China: Shigeru Miki named Metasequoia in 1941 from fossils of what seemed an extinct genus, and within a few years living trees turned up in Hubei; a 1947 expedition funded by Harvard's Arnold Arboretum collected their seeds.

The Joshua tree of the Mojave Desert is commonly said to have been named by which group?

Mormon settlers: legend says Latter-day Saint pioneers crossing the Mojave in the mid-19th century saw Joshua raising his hands to heaven in the outstretched limbs, though no contemporary record of the naming survives; the plant is a yucca.

Southern Africa's kokerboom is named for a San practice of turning its branches into what?

Quivers: kokerboom is Afrikaans for 'quiver tree', because the San hollowed its light branches to hold arrows; it is actually a tree-sized aloe, moved to the genus Aloidendron in 2013, and forms a rare forest near Keetmanshoop, Namibia.

The Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, the oldest planted tree of known date, grew from a cutting brought by which emperor's daughter?

Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta, a Buddhist nun, is by tradition the one who carried a branch of the Buddha's tree of enlightenment to Anuradhapura, where it has grown for more than 2,200 years.

Isaac Newton's apple tree at Woolsthorpe Manor appears to be which apple variety?

Flower of Kent, a coarse-fleshed cooking apple: a graft of the Woolsthorpe tree now grows outside Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton had as a student.

The Anne Frank tree in Amsterdam, which blew down in a 2010 storm, was what kind of tree?

Horse chestnut: Anne wrote in her diary about the tree she could see from the Annex; after it snapped in a storm in August 2010, saplings raised from it were planted across the United States, one at a September 11 memorial in New York.

The Liberty Tree, site of the first defiance of the 1765 Stamp Act, stood in which city?

Boston's Liberty Tree, an elm, was cut down for firewood by Loyalists in August 1775, and one soldier was killed in the process; patriots returning the next year raised a liberty pole on the site.

In 1687 colonists are said to have hidden their royal charter inside the Charter Oak in which city?

Hartford: the colonists are said to have hidden Connecticut's charter in the hollow of the great white oak to keep Sir Edmund Andros from seizing it; the tree fell in a storm in 1856.

Austin's 500-year-old Treaty Oak nearly died in 1989 after a vandal did what to it?

Poisoned it with herbicide: in 1989 Paul Cullen poured Velpar around the oak, enough to kill 100 trees; children sent get-well cards, Ross Perot signed a blank cheque for the rescue, and the tree pulled through.

Prometheus, a bristlecone pine aged over 4,800 years, was cut down in 1964 in which state?

Nevada: graduate student Donald Currey and Forest Service staff felled Prometheus on Wheeler Peak in 1964 for research, then counted over 4,800 rings, which made it the oldest known non-clonal tree at the time.

Italy's Castagno dei Cento Cavalli, a tree famed for its record girth, grows on the slopes of which volcano?

Mount Etna: legend says a queen and her hundred knights sheltered from a thunderstorm beneath this sweet chestnut; Guinness lists its girth as 57.9 metres in 1780, before it split into several trunks.

Which city has given London its Trafalgar Square Christmas tree every year since 1947?

Oslo has sent a tree from its forests to Trafalgar Square every year since 1947 in thanks for British support during the Second World War; the tree is usually 50 to 60 years old and over 20 metres tall.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York is usually which species?

Norway spruce: the Rockefeller Center tree, a tradition since 1933, usually stands 69 to 100 feet tall, and since 2007 its trunk has been milled into lumber afterwards and given to Habitat for Humanity for house building.

The name of Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse cosmology, is generally taken to mean what?

Drasill means horse and Yggr is one of Odin's names, so the name is read as a kenning for the gallows on which Odin hanged himself.

The US capital's famous Tidal Basin cherry trees were a 1912 gift from which city's mayor?

Tokyo: Mayor Yukio Ozaki sent 3,020 cherry trees in 1912 after a 1910 shipment of 2,000 was burned when inspectors found insects and nematodes; First Lady Helen Taft planted the first two on 27 March 1912.

The Quindío wax palm of the Andes, the world's tallest palm at up to 60 metres, is which country's national tree?

Colombia made the wax palm its national tree and protected it by law in 1985, after years in which young palms were killed when their leaves were cut for Palm Sunday.

The Tree of Life, a 400-year-old tree standing alone in barren desert, is a landmark of which Gulf country?

Bahrain's Tree of Life stands on a barren hill with no other large tree near it, and nobody is certain how it finds water, yet it has lived some 400 years and draws about 65,000 visitors a year.

Sam Van Aken's grafted 'Tree of 40 Fruit' bears forty varieties of which kind of fruit?

Stone fruits: over about five years Van Aken grafted branches from forty donor trees, among them peach, plum, apricot, nectarine, cherry and almond, onto one trunk; they ripen in turn from July to October.

The root bark of which North American tree was the traditional base of root beer?

Sassafras: its root bark flavoured traditional root beer until the FDA banned sassafras oil from mass-produced foods in 1960 over the carcinogen safrole; modern root beer uses safrole-free extract or other flavourings.

The Douglas fir's genus name, Pseudotsuga, literally means what?

False hemlock: Pseudotsuga combines Greek pseudo, false, with tsuga, the Japanese name for hemlock; despite its English name the Douglas fir is not a true fir (Abies), and it is the tallest tree in the pine family.

Which tree do Northwest Coast peoples traditionally carve into totem poles and canoes?

Western redcedar wood is light, aromatic and rot-resistant, so Northwest Coast peoples carve it into canoes and totem poles and weave its bark into rope, baskets and clothing; some call the tree 'long life maker'.

Malus sieversii, the main wild ancestor of the domestic apple, grows mainly in which country?

Kazakhstan: wild apple forests grow in the Tian Shan foothills near Almaty, and Silk Road traders are believed to have carried the fruit far and wide, spreading the ancestor of today's apples.

Serotinous cones on some pines and sequoias stay sealed until triggered to open by what?

Fire melts the resin that glues the cone scales shut, so the seeds drop just after the flames have cleared away the undergrowth that would have competed with the seedlings.

Which cotton-like seed-pod fibre of Ceiba pentandra was long used to fill pillows and life jackets?

Kapok fibres are hollow and shed water, so a life jacket filled with them loses little buoyancy even after long immersion; the tree is native to the tropical Americas but widely grown in Southeast Asia.

The tulip tree, Liriodendron, is a close relative of which flowering trees?

Magnolias: Liriodendron belongs to the magnolia family, so the tree sold as 'tulip poplar' is neither a tulip nor a poplar; only two species survive, one in North America and one in East Asia.

Tu BiShvat, known as the 'New Year for Trees', is a holiday in which religion?

Judaism: Tu BiShvat began as a date for telling one year's fruit from the next when tithes were due, and in modern Israel it has become a day for planting trees.

Which South Asian tree yields an insecticidal oil and twigs chewed to clean teeth?

Neem, a member of the mahogany family, is sprayed by organic farmers because its oil repels insect pests yet does little harm to bees.

By the 1890s, 70% of English oil varnishes used fossil gum from which New Zealand tree?

Kauri gum mixed easily with linseed oil, which is why varnish makers prized it; from 1910 it also went into linoleum, until synthetic substitutes sank the trade in the 1930s.

The bald cypress, famous for its woody 'knees', became which state's official tree in 1963?

Louisiana's state tree keeps a secret: nobody is sure what its knees are for, though airing the roots, anchoring the tree in soft ground and trapping sediment have all been proposed.

Figs are pollinated from the inside by which tiny insects, which crawl in through a pore at the fruit's tip?

Wasps: a female fig wasp forces her way in through the pore, often losing her wings, and lays her eggs inside; even so, the crunchy bits in a ripe fig are only seeds, not dead wasps.

Brazil nut pods are gnawed open and their seeds buried for later by which rodent?

Agouti: the rodent's chisel-like teeth can open the woody Brazil nut pod, and it buries surplus seeds, some of which sprout; the trees fruit almost only in intact forest because only a few large-bodied bees can pollinate their flowers.

Nearly half of the world's naturally occurring teak forest grows in which country?

Myanmar holds nearly half of the world's natural teak forest, but the timber is so valuable that teak has been planted far from home, from Africa to Central America.

Koalas sleep up to twenty hours a day because eucalyptus leaves are what?

Low in energy: eucalyptus leaves are fibrous, poor in nutrients and laced with toxins, so koalas sleep to save energy while digesting them; the old tale that the leaves make them drunk is a myth.

The silver birch is the national tree of which Nordic country?

Finland's national tree gives the sauna its whisk: bathers beat themselves gently with bundles of leafy young birch boughs, and in spring the rising sap is tapped as a drink.

The domestic silkworm feeds almost exclusively on the leaves of which tree?

White mulberry (Morus alba): silkworm caterpillars are drawn to its leaves by the odorant cis-jasmone and will eat little else, and the tree has been grown to feed them for more than 4,700 years.

Spanish moss, which drapes live oaks across the American South, is a relative of which fruit?

Pineapple and Spanish moss are both bromeliads, so the plant is neither Spanish nor a moss. It has almost no roots and takes its water straight from the air.

Which Italian city was built on closely spaced alder trunks driven into the mud of a lagoon?

Venice rests on trunks of alder, a wood noted for resisting water, hammered down until they reached hard clay. Plates of Istrian limestone laid on top carry the buildings.

Gin takes both its flavour and its name from the berry-like cones of which evergreen?

Juniper reached the name gin through the Dutch jenever or the French genièvre, both words for the plant. Its so-called berries are tiny cones whose fleshy scales have merged.

Which fabric, once marketed as artificial silk, is spun from cellulose extracted from trees?

Rayon, also called viscose, is classed as semi-synthetic: its raw material is natural wood cellulose, which chemistry dissolves and re-forms into fibre.

The oak roof frame nicknamed the Forest was destroyed in 2019 at a cathedral in which French city?

Paris saw Notre-Dame's lost timbers replaced like for like in oak, using mature trees chosen from forests across France.

Which future king hid in an oak tree at Boscobel to escape Parliamentarian soldiers in 1651?

Charles II spent a whole day in the branches after losing the Battle of Worcester, and later said a soldier passed directly below. The Royal Oak is now among Britain's most common pub names.

HMS Bounty left England in 1787, with Bligh in command, to fetch which tree's saplings from Tahiti?

Breadfruit was wanted as cheap food for enslaved workers in the West Indies. The ship's great cabin became a greenhouse for over a thousand potted plants before the crew mutinied.

The 1792 Buttonwood Agreement, named for a tree where brokers traded, was signed where in Manhattan?

Wall Street's 24 founding stockbrokers named their pact for the buttonwood, an American sycamore, and signed it outside number 68. It grew into the New York Stock Exchange.

Which spiky tree fruit is banned from public transport in Singapore because of its lingering smell?

Durian has an odour that can hang around for days, so hotels and transit systems in Singapore and Bangkok turn it away. Its fans still call it the king of fruits.

Which country contains more than a fifth of the world's forest, the largest share of any nation?

Russia holds more than a fifth of the world's forests on its own. Just five countries, with Brazil and Canada next on the list, contain over half of all the forest on Earth.

In Greek myth, the nymph Daphne escaped the pursuing god Apollo by being turned into which tree?

Laurel became Apollo's sacred tree in the story, and wreaths of its leaves were handed to the victors at the Pythian Games held in his honour.

In Greek myth, which goddess beat Poseidon in a contest for a city by creating the first olive tree?

Athena won because her gift supplied wood, oil and food all at once, and the olive went on to become a symbol of the winning city's prosperity.

Which wood, dense enough in some species to sink in water, traditionally made a piano's black keys?

Ebony is still shaped into clarinets, oboes and the fingerboards of violins, guitars and cellos, as well as the black keys of organs and harpsichords.

Which future US president did soldiers nickname Old Hickory for his toughness on a hard march home?

Andrew Jackson refused an order to disband his troops far from home and led them back to Nashville himself. His protégé James K. Polk was later known as Young Hickory.

The carat, the unit used to weigh gemstones, is named after the seeds of which Mediterranean tree?

Carob seeds served ancient traders as counterweights because every seed was believed to weigh the same. The modern metric carat is fixed at exactly 200 milligrams.

The Alamo in San Antonio takes its name from the Spanish word for which tree?

Cottonwood, a kind of poplar, is álamo in Spanish. The old mission probably took the name from a cavalry company from Álamo de Parras that was stationed there, or from a grove growing nearby.

Apple, plum, apricot and quince trees all belong to which plant family, along with strawberries?

Rose family trees and shrubs also give us cherries, peaches, raspberries and blackberries, which is why it ranks among the six most economically important crop plant families.

Which gas do trees remove from the atmosphere and lock away in their trunks, branches and roots?

Carbon dioxide taken in by a tree ends up as carbon built into its tissues, which is why growing forests are counted among the planet's great stores of the element.

Petrified Forest National Park, where ancient logs turned to quartz crystal, lies in which US state?

Arizona's stone logs are about 225 million years old. Groundwater carried dissolved silica from volcanic ash into the buried trunks, where quartz crystals slowly replaced the wood.

Who wrote and illustrated The Giving Tree, the 1964 picture book about a boy and an apple tree?

Shel Silverstein had trouble finding a publisher for the bittersweet story, in which the tree keeps giving to the boy until only a stump is left for him to sit on.

The Great Green Wall of trees, planned from Senegal to Djibouti, is meant to hold back which desert?

Sahara sands are the target of a project the African Union adopted in 2007. It began as a tree-planting scheme and evolved into a mosaic of restored green landscapes.

Which Kenyan founder of the tree-planting Green Belt Movement won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize?

Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win the prize. Her movement taught Kenyan women to raise trees from seed and paid them a small stipend for each seedling planted.

Which Jewish holiday, known as the New Year of the Trees, is marked in Israel by planting saplings?

Tu BiShvat began as the date for reckoning the age of fruit trees for tithes. In the 16th century, kabbalists in Safed added a seder of symbolic fruits.

The Glastonbury Thorn, said to have sprung from Joseph of Arimathea's staff, is which kind of tree?

Hawthorn of the Glastonbury kind flowers twice a year, in winter as well as spring, and a flowering sprig is sent to the British monarch every Christmas.

The Survivor Tree, recovered from the World Trade Center rubble in October 2001, is which species?

Callery pear in species, the tree spent years recovering at a nursery in the Bronx, where it even survived being uprooted by a storm in March 2010.

The plane tree under which Hippocrates is said to have taught medicine stands on which Greek island?

Kos was the physician's home island. A cutting from the tree was sent to the United States as a gift and planted at the National Library of Medicine in 1961.

The Tree That Owns Itself, a white oak said to hold the deed to its own land, grows in which city?

Athens, Georgia, tends the oak as if it were its own landlord, though only one person ever claimed to have seen the deed. The original fell in 1942 and the present tree grew from its acorn.

One banyan tree planted in 1873 grew to shade two-thirds of an acre in which Hawaiian town?

Lahaina's banyan arrived as a sapling just eight feet tall and rooted into 16 major trunks besides the original. About half its branches died when the town burned in 2023, yet fresh leaves sprouted within weeks.

In Tolkien's The Two Towers, which Ent of Fangorn Forest befriends the hobbits Merry and Pippin?

Treebeard is called Fangorn in Elvish and gave that name to the forest where he lives. He tells the two hobbits how the Elves first woke the Ents and taught them to speak.

In Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, which tufted trees does the Once-ler chop down to knit his Thneeds?

Truffula trees stand for the natural environment in the fable, while the Once-ler, who fells them for his garment business, stands for industry.

Which tropical fruit tree is a cousin of poison ivy, with peel and sap that can cause a rash?

Mango belongs to the cashew family, whose members often carry the irritant urushiol, so people who react to poison ivy are the likeliest to get a rash from the peel.

Oaks share their botanical family with which other trees, whose nuts sit in spiny husks?

Beeches give the family its scientific name, Fagaceae, from the Latin fagus. Its thousand or so species include the oaks that form the backbone of northern temperate forests.

Botanists now place maple trees in the soapberry family alongside which tropical fruit?

Lychee, longan and ackee are all soapberry relatives. Maples had a family of their own, Aceraceae, until genetic studies folded it into the wider group.

Which popular nut is really the seed of a stone fruit, from a tree closely related to the peach?

Almond trees share a subgenus with the peach, and the shell we crack is the pit of a leathery fruit. They were among the earliest fruit trees ever domesticated.

The banana plant looks like a tree but has no woody trunk, making it the world's largest what?

Herb is the botanist's word for it: what looks like a banana trunk is a pseudostem of tightly packed leaf stalks, and that is all that holds the plant up.

Which invasive host of the spotted lanternfly is the central metaphor of a 1943 Betty Smith novel?

Tree of heaven stands in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the ability to thrive in a difficult environment, the same toughness that makes it such a stubborn weed.

Chicle, the latex that long formed the base of chewing gum, is tapped from which tropical tree?

Sapodilla latex gave Spanish its everyday word for chewing gum, chicle. Thomas Adams, a founder of the gum industry, first tried to turn the latex into rubber for tyres.

Gum arabic, the additive E414 used in soft drinks and sweets, is the hardened sap of which trees?

Acacias growing wild across the Sahel supply the gum, most of it from Sudan. Mixed with pigment, the same gum is what binds watercolour paint.

Which tree releases juglone, a chemical that stunts tomatoes and many other plants growing nearby?

Black walnut carries the toxin in its roots, leaves and nut husks. Walnut trees' effect on their neighbours was noticed as far back as the 1st century, when Pliny the Elder wrote that their shade poisoned other plants.

For most of the 1900s, the heads of golf clubs called woods were carved from which hardwood?

Persimmon was so closely tied to the driver that when Taylor Made launched a stainless steel head in 1979, the company called it the Pittsburgh Persimmon.

Which element did Humphry Davy first isolate in 1807 from the salts left by leaching wood ashes?

Potassium takes its English name from potash, the residue left when the ash of burnt wood was soaked and boiled down in a pot.

Which toxic alcohol was long known as wood alcohol because it was once made by distilling timber?

Methanol was first isolated in pure form by Robert Boyle in 1661, when he distilled boxwood. Ancient Egyptian embalmers had already used a crude version made by heating wood.

What is the phenomenon called when the tops of neighbouring trees grow close but never quite touch?

Crown shyness leaves a canopy cut by channel-like gaps. One idea is that branches colliding in the wind wear each other back; another is that the gaps slow the spread of leaf-eating insects.

East Africa's whistling thorn tree houses which insects in its swollen hollow thorns as bodyguards?

Ants get shelter and nectar and in return defend the tree against giraffes and elephants. Wind blowing across their entry holes is what makes the thorns whistle.

Which tree-dwelling great ape has a name usually traced to the Malay words for person and forest?

Orangutan may at first have been a Malay term for forest-dwelling people that Europeans applied to the ape. The animals build a fresh sleeping nest of branches every night.

Białowieża Forest, home to wild European bison, straddles the border of Belarus and which country?

Poland shares with Belarus one of the last and largest surviving pieces of the primeval forest that once stretched across the European Plain. Its bison are Europe's heaviest land animals.

Which king created England's New Forest in about 1079 as a royal hunting ground?

William the Conqueror paid for his hunting ground, local legend held: two of his sons died there, including King William II, said to have been struck by a stray arrow in 1100.

The Tongass, the largest national forest in the United States, covers the southeast of which state?

Alaska's Tongass spreads over about 17 million acres of islands, fjords and glaciers, an expanse larger than ten US states, with the state capital Juneau inside it.

The Eisenhower Tree, a loblolly pine lost to an ice storm in 2014, stood on which golf course?

Augusta National member Dwight Eisenhower hit the pine so often that in 1956 he proposed cutting it down. The chairman adjourned the meeting on the spot instead of refusing a president.

Which tree latex insulated early undersea telegraph cables and was moulded into golf balls?

Gutta-percha proved so useful for cables, including the first one laid across the Atlantic, that demand outran the trees: harvesting became unsustainable and the supply collapsed.