From the B62 to the Anuradhapura Bo tree

The pharmacist told me to take the Typhoid directly home. It was in the 90’s in New York yesterday, and I had just picked up my traveler prescriptions, including anti-malarials and some just-in-case antibiotics. The tiny box labeled “Live Typhoid” needed to stay refrigerated, so I hopped on the bus to spare it a hot walk down Bedford Avenue. Though harmless in its four blister-packed capsules, it was a heightened moment on New York City transit, a la La Jette or 12 Monkeys.

 

This is part of my travel prep for Sri Lanka, my next OLTW journey, which will be underway in a few weeks. Film? Check. Culturally appropriate clothing? Check. Immunizations? Check. I leave on August 1^st, and arrive in Colombo, the capital, on August 3^rd after what I’m sure will be a delirious 12 hours in Dubai, sandwiched by nearly 12-hour and 5-hour flights, respectively. (Sri Lanka, to save you the Google search, is the tear-shaped island off the southeast coast of India.)

And what is it I’m after, you ask? A 2,239-year-old banyan fig tree that lays claim to several distinctions:

• It’s the oldest historically cultivated tree on record
• It grew from a transplanted branch of the tree under which Siddhārtha Gautama attained enlightenment. As the story goes, the branch was brought to Sri Lanka under the specific instruction of the historical Buddha, planted in 228 BCE
• It’s one of the world’s oldest angiosperms. (That’s flowering plants, kids. Look that one up.)  The oldest angiosperm? Probably not. You might remember the ancient Olive and Chestnut I photographed in the fall that also meet that distinction. The Baobabs, too. Ooh, and the Llareta. You get the picture.

As I was calculating the exact age (um, yes: 2011 + 228) of the Anuradhapura Bo tree (which also happens to be a UNESCO site and one of the longest historically inhabited cites in the world), I was reminded of the “year 0” dilemma.  A number of numerical systems skip from - 1 to +1, as it were, without counting the zero. Sort of like buildings that eschew a 13^th floor. The Buddhist calendar does include a year zero, though it begins somewhere between 554 and 483 BCE. Which means that our 2,239-year-old tree just might be 2,240. But who’s counting?

 

The 13,000-year-old Oak of the Inland Empire

 [Rachel photographing the Jurupa Hills Oak in February 2011. Photo by Marie Regan.]

About six months ago I got an email from a biologist at UC Davis telling me about a discovery that he and his colleagues made down near UC Riverside. It was a clonal scrub oak, Quercus palmeri, that's at least 13,000 years old, and might actually be twice that. The biologist, Jeffery Ross-Ibarra, saw an article about my project on CNN and thought I might be interested in including their discovery in my project. He was right.

This past week I flew out to Los Angeles, along with my friend and wonderful filmmaker Marie Regan, who is capturing the first documentary footage for the Oldest Living Things in the World project. We drove to Riverside, where we met up with Jeffery (who just happened to be in town for a conference), and Mitch Provance, who was the first person to have a hunch that the Oak was something out of the ordinary. We also met Andy Sanders, master of the UCR Herbarium, who helped Mitch confirm his hunch. Over a decade later, their paper was published, confirming the minimum age of 13,000 years, and conferring the title of oldest continuously living organism in Southern California. (Though it's got nothing on the 80,000-year-old Quaking Aspen clone, Pando, in Utah.)

 [The Jurupa Hills Oak. 13,000 years old. Riverside, California.] 

So what does this thing look like? If you're picturing something akin to the 'Giving Tree' or something on the massive scale of the Giant Sequoias, think again. In fact, like many clonal organisms, you might walk right by it, never knowing you'd come in such close proximity to such exceptional longevity. In fact, you might not know you were even in the presence of an Oak. The leaves are tough with sharp holly-like points, though they're not related. 

See that silvery, sagey looking shrub? That's it. The bright green in the foreground actually belongs to a type of Cherry. The Oak clone extends over the ridge of the hillside, though not down the other side. It found a purchase on this steep hillside at a time when mastodon and camels still roamed the area, and has quietly persisted ever since, even as housing developments, a cement factory, containers filled with modular home components, and the traffic of off-road vehicles became its new neighbors. 

It's a difficult climb to the top (especially when dividing ones attention between maintaining ones footing and safely transporting ones camera equipment), but I'm sure that's what has afforded the Oak the off-the-beaten path anonymity that allowed it to survive into the present.

The Ancient Olive of Ano Vouves

[Olive tree of Ano Vouves, approx. 3,000-years-old (unconfirmed)]

I find I've been talking about "time flying" a lot lately. A blink (and a 19-hour travel day) later, and I'm back home in Brooklyn. It's amazing how 30 days on the road and crossing 7 time zones requires so much recalibration. It feels significant in the realm of personal time, but what happens when pondering the loose fragment of a second taken to capture an image of 4,000 years of growth? Even if we don't think back quite that far, the question remains - what did it feel like when it took months to get from that village in Crete all the way to New York City? Or years? Or how about when the continents weren't even known to each other? To us, it is always now...and now seems to be getting faster and faster. So I wonder: If context shapes our understanding and experience of time, are we therefore temporal relativists?                                                                                                                                     
Ok. I'll stop waxing philosphic for the moment and leave you with this picture of the venerable old tree, holding court in upper Vouves. Stay tuned for the 1,000 words later.

Posidonia Oceanica

It's amazing how time can fly by on the road. It seems that one minute I was still trying to gain more intimate access to the Castagno dei 100 Cavalli (which I did, albeit in the rain), and in the blink of an eye it's already my last day in Spain. 

In the past week I made four dives to different sites where the Posidonia Oceanica grows, the image here a rather shallow shot, showing off the beautiful color of the grass, and hinting at the expansive meadow. The grass extends all the way from Ibiza to Formentera, and was designated as a UNESCO world heritage site, even before its exceptional age was discovered. 

It was really interesting to watch the biologists at work, hear about the accidental discovery of the clone grass (analysis of the genome of shoots from well-separated plots proved identical), and to hear about the vital role of the meadow in the ecosystem - as well as the invasive species of algae that now endanger it. More details on all of this to come, and in the mean time, see them below, counting shoots of grass in special plots which they've been returning to for the past 10 years.

Tomorrow it's off to Crete, in search of what very well might be the world's oldest Olive tree.

A tough (chest)nut to crack

PLAN B 

It's proving a bit tricky to get accurate information on the age of the tree, or to even get through the gate for that matter. (No, that rope fence isn't holding me back - I'm still relegated to the outer circle of the high metal fence. I stuck my camera through the slats, my arms separated by a post, to get this shot.)

I've gotten a small taste of Italian bureaucracy in trying to gain access and information, but it's been tempered by one of the most helpful people I've yet to meet on my travels. Valentina, jack of all trades at the agroturisomo, sat and made call after call for me this morning, speaking in rapid Italian to scientists in Catania and Florence. The first, it turned out, was an entomologist. He passed along the information for someone he said was an expert on the tree. When we got her on the phone, she told that she would study the tree, except she's not all that interested in forestry. She passed along the name of another 'expert,' this one who was at least offer up the information that there is a book on the subject. Which brought us full circle back to the first call Valentina made, to Sant'Alfio City Hall. Someone will be coming up to meet us here this afternoon, perhaps with book in hand. And then we'll set out together to find the traffic carabinieri to open the gate.

Fingers crossed. 

Buongiorno Castagno

First look, Castagno dei 100 Cavali (5 exposures)

It's my second morning here in Sicily. Another overcast day, but that's my favorite shooting weather.  After settling in yesterday, I went directly to the Castagno dei 100 Cavali. It seems to be quite happy, large and green and heavy with the season's chestnuts. Today I'm trying to find out how to breach the protective fence which encircles it. I've just been instructed to find the traffic police in the town square -two women in a white car - and ask them to let me in.

I arrived here in Sant'Alfio yesterday afternoon, after a somewhat harrowing drive from Catania, where I had flown in the night before. Street signs, traffic lanes, signals - who needs 'em? Scooters and motorcycles whip by from all directions, pedestrians cross whenever and where ever they see fit, cars push their way towards/into/in front of wherever they're trying to go. One out of five streets seems to have a sign. I laughed aloud while driving up a busy, narrow two-lane street, the scooters scooting comfortably into the oncoming traffic... suddenly joined by an older woman in a motorized chair, wheeling her way up the street as a bus barreled towards them all from the opposite direction. No one seemed to find this unusual except me. 

Good thing I'm not a nervous driver.

And from that frenetic drive in Catania into the country-stillness of Sant'Alfio. It's quiet and peaceful here, birds breaking the near-silence amidst olive, apple, fig and plum trees that dot the still-working farm and one-time monastery where I'm staying. The farm dogs were kind enough to give me a walking tour when I arrived.

And on that note, it's time to get off the computer and back to the tree.  Oh, and feel free to check in on my Flickr stream, where I'm posting more images from my trip.

Ciao for now...

OLTW TED talk now live

I'm off to Sicily tomorrow, to find the Chestnut of 100 Horses. The owner of an old converted monastery where I'll be staying just shared the email addresses for the biologists who study it, so hopefully I'll get an accurate scientific low-down on the actual age of the Chestnut first hand.

In the mean time, I'm very happy to share my TED talk with you. Enjoy!