Here at American Forests, we love big trees — as is evident by our 70-plus-year-old National Big Tree Program. We love big trees for a variety of reasons, like their size and the histories they tell, but perhaps the biggest reason is the most hidden of all: They’re good for our forests. A study released [...]
Snakes creep me out. I get goosebumps looking at their pictures. I hid my face during any sequence in the last few Harry Potter films involving a large digitized snake. Yep, I’m a wuss when it comes to snakes. Yet, for the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by the story of Burmese pythons in [...]
Last week, we celebrated the birthday of the “Father of National Parks.” Today, we’re recognizing another famous father. Frederick Law Olmsted, aka “Father of Landscape Architecture” and creator of many of America’s famous urban parks, was born on this date in 1822. During a century in which America was rapidly expanding and becoming more urban, [...]
When I first heard of American Forests’ National Big Tree Program, I instantly envisioned towering, giant trees — the kind that hurt your neck when you try to take in all their grandeur. But, my awe of those redwoods and sequoias was soon replaced by a love for the “tiny titans.” As their name implies, [...]
When you read the words forests and wildlife, I’m sure the first visions that pop into your head are pictures of deer foraging in the understory, squirrels running up trunks and birds flitting in the canopy. Forests, though, aren’t home just to our mammalian and avian friends. What would your reaction be if I told [...]
American football first emerged on the sports scene about 140 years ago, around the same time that Virginia Tech was being founded in Blacksburg, Virginia. More than 200 years prior to those moments — back in the same century that America’s first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, was being established — some white oak trees took [...]
Every day, our forests and trees are under assault: from droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes to fires and climate change. One particular brand of threat, though, is often sneaky, small and numbers in the thousands: insects. Trees and insects can often have a symbiotic relationship, with the insect providing pollination and other services to the trees, [...]
Every time I turned around this week, there seemed to be some new study, research or news related to forests, trees and flora that made me go, “That’s really interesting.” This made selecting a topic for today’s blog excessively difficult, so instead of selecting one, I selected four. Hope you find each of them as [...]
This weekend, college hoops fans will be treated to the final dance. The end of a more than three weeks of madness will culminate in New Orleans on a shining, squeaking maple court, and that maple court had just as long a journey to the Final Four as each of the basketball teams playing on [...]
Raise your hand if you’d love to reduce your carbon footprint, but feel like you lack the information or resources to do so. In 2009, each American spent an average of $3,460 in energy expenditures according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. When this couple thousand dollars’ worth of electricity is consumed is almost impossible [...]
