VOICE ONE:
This is Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Shirley Griffith with the VOA Special English program”EXPLORATIONS.” Today, we tell about an unusual project to save andreproduce some of the biggest and oldest trees in the United States.
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VOICE ONE:
Our story begins more than two-thousand meters high in the WhiteMountains in the western state of California. The White Mountainsare near California’s border with Nevada.
This is an area of weather extremes. In the winter thetemperature is extremely cold. Snow can be very deep. In the summer,this same area can be extremely hot and suffer from a lack of water.The wind blows hard here almost all the time.
Something very special is here, too. California’s White Mountainshave something no mountains in the rest of the world can claim. Theyare home to the oldest living thing on Earth.
VOICE TWO:
The oldest living thing is a kind of tree called a BristleconePine. The oldest of them is a Bristlecone Pine that local peoplecall Methuselah. Methuselah is a person in the Christian holy book,the Bible, who is supposed to have lived nine-hundred-sixty-nineyears.
Methuselah the Bristlecone Pine is much older than the Methuselahwritten about in the Bible. It fact, experts say Methuselah the treeis almost five-thousand years old.
This very old tree also looks very dead. It seems to be acollection of bent and twisted wood. It looks as if it has beenshaped by the fierce wind that blows in the White Mountains.Methuselah looks more like a wood statue than a tree. But if youlook closely you can see a few small green leaves. Methuselah isstill very much alive.
Methuselah is a very successful example of a Bristlecone pinetree. Experts say it is a true champion among trees. Methuselahwould be an excellent choice if you wanted to make an exact copy ofa Bristlecone Pine. And an environmental group has already madeplans to do so.
VOICE ONE:
Our story now moves from the California mountains to a farm inthe small town of Buckley in the middle western state of Michigan.George Svec is a farmer. He plants corn. A huge American Elm tree isin one of Mister Svec’s cornfields. It is more than thirty-fourmeters tall. Experts say it could be almost four-hundred years old.
This huge American Elm tree is very unusual. It survived a treedisease that killed millions of American Elms beginning in theNineteen-Fifties.
American Elm trees are now in danger of disappearing from theEarth. Experts believe Mister Svec’s tree is resistant to thedisease. They believe it was exposed to the disease but did notbecome infected. Mister Svec’s American Elm is another true championamong trees because of its size and the fact that it may havesuccessfully protected itself against the disease.
Mister Svec’s American Elm and Methuselah the Bristlecone Pineare both part of the Champion Tree Project. The people who createdthe project work to protect and copy as many of America’s championtrees as possible.
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VOICE TWO:
The first settlers to arrive on the East Coast of North Americafound a land filled with many different kinds of huge trees. Someforests were so thick it was difficult for travelers to find a paththrough them. The huge forests provided lumber to build homes. Theyalso provided wood for cooking fires.
Settlers removed many trees to clear the land and plant farmcrops. In time, the trees slowly began to disappear. The ChampionTree Project hopes to help replace some of the trees that have beenlost over the years.
The project will use a method called cloning. Experts take asmall living part from a champion tree and place it inside a cutmade in a more common tree. The cut is then wrapped very tightly toprevent water or insects from entering it.
As the cloned tree begins to grow, it will have all the genes ofthe parent champion tree. This kind of cloning is called grafting.It is a very old method used to successfully reproduce plants andtrees.
One tree that will be cloned is Mister Svec’s American Elm. It isa candidate for the Champion Tree Project because it is the largesttree of its kind. And cloning that tree would help make sure thatthe American Elm will survive.
VOICE ONE:
The Champion Tree Project is five years old now. It was the ideaof David Milarch and his son Jared. They own a small tree and plantbusiness in the town of Copemish, Michigan.
At the age of sixteen, Jared Milarch asked his father why so manytrees were dying. He asked why they could not copy or graft some ofthe champion trees he had seen. That is how the project began. TheMilarchs’ first plans called for grafting one-hundred trees in thestate of Michigan.
The project expanded very quickly. The two were asked to graftand plant trees all around the country. They have financial helpfrom the National Tree Trust, a non-profit organization inWashington, D.C.
In the years to come, the Milarchs hope to clone and reproducethe largest examples of more than eight-hundred different kinds ofAmerican trees. All of them are champion trees. These huge treeshave been identified since Nineteen-Forty by the American Forestsorganization.
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VOICE TWO:
Mount Vernon is the home of the first president of the UnitedStates, George Washington. It is in the southern state of Virginia,near Washington D-C. More than one-million people visit Mount Vernoneach year.
The private organization that is responsible for Mount Vernonworks very hard at keeping the president’s home as he left it. Theysay President Washington would recognize the house as it is today.However he would not be happy with the trees at Mount Vernon.
Only thirteen trees remain that are believed to have been plantedby George Washington more than two-hundred years ago. They are huge,beautiful trees. Other, younger trees are much smaller and are notthe same kind as the older ones. George Washington was very carefulabout where he planted the trees on his huge farm. He wanted them toadd beauty to his farm and to block the sun from the house.
Dean Norton is responsible for trees and plants at Mount Vernon.The Milarch family offered to help him clone the thirteen originaltrees. Cuttings will soon be taken from the trees. The Milarchs hopeto provide as many as thirty trees of each kind.
VOICE ONE:
David and Jared Milarch will also provide Mount Vernon withfourteen different kinds of champion trees from other parts of theUnited States. These will be clones from the oldest, strongest andlargest of their kind.
David Milarch says there is no real way to tell if the new treeswill be as big and as strong as the parent trees. However, he saysthey have the genes that can make a huge, healthy tree possible.
Mister Milarch hopes to provide Mister Norton with one-hundrednew cloned trees each year for the next ten years. Mister Nortonsays he will use fences to protect the new trees from deer that liketo eat young trees.
VOICE TWO:
John Alleyne works with the Florida Botanical Garden in NorthLargo, in the southern state of Florida. He is a gene researchscientist. He says the Champion Tree Project is very important. Hesays the project is working to keep the genes of very old successfultrees alive.
Mister Alleyne says it is very important to keep these ancienttree genes alive so gene scientists can learn their secrets. Thereis something in their genes that permits them to reach an extremeold age. Mister Alleyne says science needs to learn about thesesecrets.
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VOICE ONE:
High up in California’s White Mountains, the Bristlecone Pineknown as Methuselah is waiting to be cloned. If the cloning issuccessful, the new Bristlecone pine tree will not be planted atMount Vernon or anywhere else. It will be planted near its parenttree in the White Mountains of California. Bristlecone pine treeswill not grow anywhere else.
There are not many Bristlecone pine trees left in the world.Cloning Methuselah will help make sure these ancient trees willsurvive into the future. It will provide a new tree that carriesgenes that have already successfully survived for the lastfive-thousand years. Supporters of the Champion Tree Project hope itis possible a tree with those genes could survive anotherfive-thousand years.
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VOICE TWO:
This program was written and produced by Paul Thompson. Ourstudio engineer was Keith Holmes This is Shirley Griffith.
VOICE ONE:
And this is Steve Ember. Join us again next week forEXPLORATIONS, a program in Special English on the Voice of America.