alt Hacker NewsThe oddest tree I know of is poplar, which is incredibly common around here and is basically considered junk wood. Turns out, those individual, fast-growing trees are in fact stems of a large underground root system.
One of these trees has 47,000 stems:
> Most agree [...] that Pando encompasses 42.89 hectares (106 acres), weighs an estimated 6,000 metric tons (6,600 short tons) or 13.2 million pounds, and features an estimated 47,000 stems, which die individually and are replaced by genetically identical stems that are sent up from the tree's vast root system, a process known as "suckering". The root system is estimated to be several thousand years old, with habitat modeling suggesting a maximum age of 14,000 years and 16,000 years by the latest (2024) estimate.[
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Poplar is considered junk wood? This is news to me. I’ve seen plenty of poplar furniture.
My favorite odd tree is the ginkgo. The way the leaves are look ancient, like a tree from a fargone era. And it is exactly that.
Also the fruit was fun to throw at people when I was a kid... Very stinky.
Poplars have underground roots, but they are not "underground root stems" per se. Their main stem is the trunk we see growing above ground.