The idea is that someone grew cedars in concentric rings as an experiment to see exactly how greater and lesser degrees of density would affect growth. And it did affect it in a fairly regular way, leading to the creation of these tree bowls or whatever we should call them. It just looks so cool and is another reason why Cedars are great.
More information about trees is needed before I can finish the tree rankings. In particular, it's important to note some of the trees on the list are coming from way out in left or right field somewhere, genetically speaking, and this gives them a slight boost all by itself. They're unique or related to the others in an unusual way. For example, the ginkgo! Or the sequoia, which is a conifer but more of a third cousin to the rest of the firs and spruces and pines in the Pinaceae family. It's closer to the bald cypress or others we saw earlier like the juniper, and more importantly, it's not the same as the Coast Redwood, which would have been included on the list if I had adequately understood this. I thought the sequoia was almost the same thing but this is false. The redwood is its own tree. I also had them mapped in a crazily incorrect way in my head, based on having traveled to the Sequoia national park and forest as a child. In my mind, ALL of this stuff was either West or North and Northwest of Yosemite! I had positioned Bakersfield and Fresno somewhere on the mental map where Sacramento actually is now, which is crazy but that's how it was. I had to do a lot of rearranging of confusions.
Anyway, those are the distant cousins, but once we dig into the actual Pinaceae family, I have a terrible time ranking anything because I love everything in this group so much. It's like comparing vanilla ice cream with bergamot sauce to vanilla ice cream with lavender sauce. How should I know or care, when they're both perfect as-is? Anyway, we have to rank, so these are some relevant considerations:
You can think of the Pine family as dividing into roughly four portions for our present purposes:
1. Pines, of which we have remaining the Ponderosa and White pines, and we've seen others from the pine subfamily earlier. Pines have clusters of needles, usually long but can be shorter too. They tend to have more spaciously arrayed branches. Some of the oldest trees in the world are bristlecone pines, which could have been added to this list as well. It was difficult to mix trees I know well with trees I haven't seen in person (much) and have to rank based on interesting facts and looks in photos.
2. Picea or Spruces, of which we could have listed several but I've narrowed it down to the Blue (which includes many exciting variant cultivars) and the Norway. You may be familiar with others like the Red or Black spruce - I had a hard time not including the Black because it has VIOLET cones in the early cone stages! But I mostly see Blues and Norways. The spruces can be known by their pointy and usually slightly curving needles. They don't grow in clusters like the pines but they're squarish and sharp and bossy.
3. The Laricoideae include a couple of important entries on the list, the Larch and Douglas Fir. But this group is NOT the group of the firs (see below), because oddly the Douglas is not a true fir and instead is called pseudotsuga or false hemlock! Anyway, these get together and have their own singly attached needles unlike the pines, but they're siblings over here in another house.
4. The Abies or Firs are the last key subfamily of the larger Pinaceae family - these include the Hemlock and the other Firs (for our purposes the Balsam fir). They also have a pseudolarch over here in this house, the Golden larch, but I've never seen one that I'm aware of. Otherwise, larches all belong above. The Firs can be identified by having soft and pliant needles, possibly because they're flat and not stout like the spruce needles. They're also singly attached, unlike the pines, and make spiraling patterns.
To come up with the top 20 we have to grab a couple of winners from each of these four categories, plus other conifers like the sequoia. This obviously distorts things because all the other kinds of trees have to compete against this huge group, and it's also hard to pluck a few out here and declare them obviously superior when they're all so good. The list would have to go to 100 and would be populated at the top by SO MANY pines if I had included all the species in this family that I love - and of course, the redwood doesn't even appear although you have to imagine it would be somewhere in this top ten near its sibling. So just know that all of these trees kick ass. From here on out they will be appearing in ways that don't really reflect an objective degree of ass kicking so much as my personal preference for how they appear.
Well well well... We're going to be talking about people like Pando very soon. Whether you think the existence of these collective entities is an exciting positive or a strange negative remains an open question.
