I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual.
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
helterskelter 47 minutes ago [-]
It's funny, a neighbor had me cut their eucalyptus down, then it grew back from the stump and I had to cut it again a couple years later. Then I has to cut it again a few years after that. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut it again soon. It's become a running joke at this point.
Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
All I know about them is they're bad railroad ties, and they explode.
True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties.
In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.
While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.
(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
cluckindan 5 hours ago [-]
Related: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
There's no such thing as a fish either. Unless you count whales, parrots and Kanye West as fish.
1 hours ago [-]
tomaskafka 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details?
See also category theory vs prototype theory.
TeMPOraL 2 hours ago [-]
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
metronomer 30 minutes ago [-]
Agree. Latour's got neat arguments too (commenting on Pandora's Hope)
smusamashah 5 hours ago [-]
The traveller tree looked the most interesting, like a peacock's feather.
The UK has quite a few ancient yew trees. Some may be over 2000 years old. Often they are in church grounds (because ones that weren't got cut down to make long bows perhaps?).
One of the many nice things about nature is that almost everything is interesting and unique in some particular way, be it longevity, size, or far more specific traits, across all species, all domains of natural science.
volemo 5 hours ago [-]
Wasn't sure which kind of trees to expect. :D
woadwarrior01 5 hours ago [-]
I was expecting something closer to Van Emde Boas trees. :D
speed_spread 4 hours ago [-]
It's Red-Black Maple Syrup season!
sheept 6 hours ago [-]
On mobile, this website seems to prevent you from pinch zooming in, which makes it slightly inconvenient to quickly zoom into the photos of the trees.
mbeex 5 hours ago [-]
Can do it on Ironfox Android (quite a forbidding browser) without problems. Not even JavaScript is allowed here.
philipov 3 hours ago [-]
It's to help you learn to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away.
orthoxerox 2 hours ago [-]
Number thirty-three: the larch. The larch.
karussell 3 hours ago [-]
I highly recommend this 12min video "Trees Are So Weird"
Highly recommend a series on Lodoicea (aka Double coconut or Coco de mer) from the Weird Explorer yt channel: https://youtu.be/GqicsIDYmgU
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
This is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article).
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
abound 2 hours ago [-]
In the age of LLMs, it wouldn't be hard to build a UI on top of a Wikipedia dump [1] that satisfied any particular idea of serendipitous flipping.
A while back I read this book "The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter" from Colin Tudge and I was blown away by the fact that Mangrove roots effectively breath with the rhythm of tide. As the water recedes, change in pressure and the air is drawn into the pores. As the water comes in, pressure pushes stale air out and seals the pores. Trees are beautiful.
simquat 5 hours ago [-]
In Calabria — the very south of Italy — there this[0] 1000-years-old plane tree.
I like to imagine aliens visiting earth and walking straight past us and communing with Pando.
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.
speed_spread 4 hours ago [-]
That would make as much sense as trying to speak with Whales.
danparsonson 1 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with whales?
philipov 3 hours ago [-]
And now... No. 1: The Larch
ValveFan6969 2 hours ago [-]
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aaron695 5 hours ago [-]
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Guestmodinfo 2 hours ago [-]
The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
estimator7292 2 hours ago [-]
Let people enjoy things. You aren't contributing to the conversation, you're trying to shit on everyone else for finding something interesting.
t-3 2 hours ago [-]
Pushing back against the subtle suggestion that only American and European viewpoints are normal is more an example of cleaning up shit than shitting on anybody.
lokar 54 minutes ago [-]
Given where the plurality of readers of this site live (SF Bay Area), the inclusion of the coast redwoods cuts against your argument.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 15:30:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI
In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.
While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.
(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travel...
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2025/08/ancient-yew-tr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
[0]https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platano_di_Vrisi
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.