The Official Blog of Our City Forest offers gardening advice, tree care tips, arborist and urban forestry facts from multiple contributors. The Our City Forest Blog also shares stories from our community of volunteers and our AmeriCorps service members' experiences.
Hello Internet! I’m writing again for all of you curious tree people after the holidays. When last I left, you were in your living rooms examining your Christmas/non-denominational holiday trees as a guide for how tree anatomy works. Toward the end I pulled the rug out from under our tropical and sub-tropical readers when I revealed that palms aren’t actually true trees at all.
So now that we’ve sprinted through approximately 480 million years of evolution, going from Charophyte algae to bryophyte moss to primitive vascular Cooksonia to the first forests it’s time stop, breathe, and look around at the plants in our lives.
As the Ordovician period progressed the environment changed. Atmospheric CO2 plummeted from 7000 to 4400 ppm and the Earth cools. This may have been partially caused by green, aquatic algae and land plants as they sucked and sequestered atmospheric CO2.
