Can You see the wood for the trees? A bit of Sunday botany and its relationship to markets

Dear Reader,

I have just come in from a wet and wild Sunday bike ride in the Northamptonshire countryside and thought I would dry out write a fun fact article. At this time of year it seems that I actually spend more time cleaning the bike after riding it rather than actually riding.

Dendrology... The study of Trees. This is the subject of today's scribble and hopefully like me you might learn something about our barky friends.

The word comes from the ancient greek word dendron (δένδρον) for tree. I personally thought it was something to do with dandruff until I checked it.  

Trees are very much like funds in a way. There are big ones , small ones, some that grow quickly and some take a lot longer.A 2009 study by Bryan Black found that the oldest trees take the longest to grow.  A diverse portfolio of trees (funds) is vital to have a strong chance of good growth.

Botanic Gardens Conservation International  in the UK have catalogued 60,065 different species of trees out there. If you are interested they have a search engine where you can look them all up.

https://tools.bgci.org/global_tree_search.php

There not only an awful lot of coffee in Brazil it is also home to the largest number of types of tree with 8715 species, half of which are unique to that country.  At the other end of the spectrum the Arctic was found to have no species of tree at all.

A 2015 Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies  study calculated that there are 3.04 trillion trees in the world with their calculations that the Amazon basin alone was home to 390 billion.  But before you all get excited they also considered that the total number of trees has declined by around 46% since mankind started running about all over the place. Please don't tell Greta or she might stop even taking boats.

The oldest individual tree in the world is 5062 years old. It is a bristlecone pine found in the White mountains in California.  This pales in comparison to the oldest 'clonal' tree - basically a group of trees living off the same root system. The Pando in Utah is one of those systems and is believed to be 80,000 years old.   Good luck in counting the rings on them then!

The tallest tree in the world is in Borneo nicknames menara is over 100 meters tall.

And with that I will leave you to enjoy the rest of your Sunday wherever you may be and hope you learned something new today.

Best

Don 'Lumberjack' King