The record-breakers
The oldest, the largest, the fastest, the longest-leaved — and the tree that fires its seeds at seventy metres a second.
- 01
Trees№ 0574 minBristlecone Pine: The Oldest Living Things on Earth
Gnarled high-desert pines that live nearly five thousand years by growing as slowly and as tough as possible — and whose rings have let us calibrate the dating of the ancient world.
- 02
Trees№ 3895 minRedwoods: The Tallest and the Largest
Coast redwood, giant sequoia, and dawn redwood — fog harvesting, fire-proof bark, and the conifer that resprouts.
- 03
Trees№ 2474 minKauri: New Zealand's Colossus and the Disease Closing Its Forests
One of the largest and longest-lived trees on Earth — a Gondwanan conifer that builds vast columnar trunks, made forests of its own, gave up a fossil gold, and is now dying of a soil disease spread on boot soles.
- 04
Trees№ 0313 minBaobab: The Tree of Life
The ancient baobab stores thousands of litres of water, feeds people and pollinators, and anchors African savannas for two thousand years.
- 05
Trees№ 0305 minBanyan and Strangler Figs: The Trees That Grow Downward and Kill Their Hosts
Figs that begin life in the treetops, send roots down to strangle the tree that hosted them, spread into forests of a single individual, feed half the rainforest — and depend on a wasp that lives one day.
- 06
Trees№ 3814 minRaffia Palm: The Longest Leaves on Earth
African swamp palms that grow the largest leaves of any plant in the world — up to 25 metres long — and yield raffia, the soft, strong garden-and-craft fibre, along with palm wine and a scaly 'snake-skin' fruit.
- 07
Trees№ 1584 minFalcataria: One of the Fastest-Growing Trees on Earth
A nitrogen-fixing tropical legume that can grow seven metres in a year — a prized fast plantation timber and shade tree that has also become a towering, brittle invader of Pacific islands.
- 08
Trees№ 4093 minSandbox Tree: The Dynamite Tree That Fires Its Seeds
A spiny tropical giant whose ripe seed pods explode like grenades, flinging their seeds at seventy metres a second — armoured with a caustic, poisonous sap once smeared on arrows and poured into rivers to stun fish.
- 09
Trees№ 2454 minKapok and Balsa: The Rainforest Giants of Feather and Foam
A sacred emergent tree that fills its pods with buoyant cotton, and the fastest-growing pioneer whose wood is the lightest in commercial use — two extremes from one family.