6 weird things you didn’t know about trees

National Arbour Week is a campaign headed up by the The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Daff) and is the best time for South Africans to get their hands dirty planting indigenous trees as a symbol and gesture of sustainable environmental management.

In light of this, we’ve sussed out a few surprising things you may not have known about trees.

1. For years, trees have been used to make drugs, including aspirin, ecstasy and chemotherapy medications, like taxol which is produced from the Yew tree.

2. Trees don’t die of old age. In fact, they are the longest living organisms on Earth. Except for the ones which commit suicide. That’s a real thing! Recently, a type of palm tree was discovered and in order for it to reproduce, it has to kill itself. It does this by putting all of its energy into attracting pollinators and bearing fruit.

3. A family of four needs the oxygen from two trees in order to breathe.

4. They make sounds when they’re distressed. It’s reported that French scientists recorded sounds from trees that were suffering because of drought. Apparently, they make sounds that are described as ‘a weird ultrasonic bubbling sound’.

5. They also communicate – and not in the ‘talk to hobbits’ kind of way that Lord of The Rings portrays. For example, willow trees secrete a chemical when it is attacked by insects, alerting its tree friends nearby. These friends then produce a substance called tannin onto their leaves so that the rampaging insects can’t get to them.

6. Think the elephant is the largest living thing on the land? It’s got nothing on the Giant Sequoia in the Redwood Forest of California. This is the largest living tree in the world at thirty stories tall, 25.09 meters in circumference and weighing a whopping 2.756 tons!

*Article first published in 2015