We often don’t think of buildings or trees or animals as famous, except cats, but strangely enough we do know about a number of trees across the world, sometimes through religion and other times just through sheer shock that a tree or tree colony can live so long and still keep going.
And that’s the real power of the different trees; they are not only famous, but they last far longer than your average celebrity, which means they’ve been celebrities for many generations. In fact, you could say the tree was the first celebrity ever.
Of course, it would be a hard game to play if you were searching for what tree was actually the oldest. We definitely know that despite the Bodhi tree existing before, and even supposedly being the originator of another incredibly old tree in Sri Lanka, it is certainly not the oldest nor is it still living. Then we have Methuselah, which is a Bristlecone that was nearly five thousand years old, but right nearby we have an even older Bristlecone tree, which knocked that one out. And this isn’t even considering the trees that are actually one giant collective community.
A group of over 50,000 Aspen trees is one giant communal group and they have been around as a total group for over 80,000 years, but many of the individual trees have been dying off and regrowing for years, so that might not count as having lived as one organism for that long.
As for the most famous though, it might actually be the trees collectively mentioned in the Bible, considering the Bible is one of the biggest sellers in the world for books. The Cedars of God, in particular, is mentioned over 70 times throughout the Bible and then mentioned many times in historical records, by such luminaries as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. We also see them mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which means the Cedars of God might truly be the most famous trees, collectively, in the world since they’ve been the most exposed.
Until we can do a survey of some kind though we will just have to guess with the many wonderful types of trees in the world. Do you have a favorite tree or colony of trees? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: http://www.avclub.com/article/call-paparazzi-its-wikipedias-list-famous-trees-207981
