For children: A new book answers every question that a child might have about trees and their lives

How do trees stand so straight and tall when they don’t even have backbones?

Good question! About 500 million years ago, plants, which had until then grown only in water, evolved to live on land. But it took them 130 million more years to figure out the engineering required to create a trunk that was strong enough to support the weight of an entire tree while “standing up”. Here are some cool innovations that trees came up with to make this possible.

They built their own “backbones”

Trees grow in two ways. They grow longer at the tips of their roots (searching for water) and at the tips of their branches (searching for the sun). They also grow thicker around their trunks. Each year, when the weather is favourable, the trunk grows a new ring of cells and gets fatter. This new ring consists of xylem cells, which take over the job of moving the water and minerals from the roots to the leaves. The older ring of the xylem dies, and joins the even older rings inside the trunk to become what is called the heartwood, the strong, solid centre of the tree. (PS: It isn’t quite accurate to call the heartwood of a...

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