Life Changing Trees: Save a Tree and Change Your Life

Part 5: Without Trees, We will Lose Absolute Beauty and Wonder

(Previous parts at the end of the article)

There is no denying that trees are absolutely beautiful. This is perhaps the most obvious, but least thought about benefit of trees and forests. Every forest has an abstract combination of greenery, shade, tranquility, and activity that cannot fail to impress even the most cynical of us.

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The main reason that we like trees is they are beautiful and majestic organisms and like us every tree is unique. There are many different species of trees that have different shapes, textures, forms and colors. Trees regality, their strength, their long lifespan give us a sense of awe about them and most of us react to the presence of trees with a comfortable relaxed feeling.

Every (non evergreen) tree varies its appearance throughout the year and often looking at the trees gives us a good indication of the season, every season beautiful for its own reasons.

Even now, scientists speculate that the Amazon rainforests might be completely destroyed in 50 years time. That means that our great grandchildren may not have the chance to visit them. That is truly sad.

Visiting your local forest, or hugging your local tree, might even be enough to convince you that we must appreciate trees more and do our best to preserve old-growth forests (and all trees) for our future generations to enjoy.

Trees are also amazing at self-defense. Scientists have discovered that when trees are attacked by insects, their leaves are flooded with chemicals called phenolics. These chemicals are very noxious and distasteful to the insect attackers and these phenolics can actually stunt their growth.

In addition to this self-defense mechanism, trees that are being attacked are able to communicate (or signal) to other trees about an impending insect attacks, so that the other trees will flood their leaves with phenolics ready to face the insect pests.

Trees are thought to release chemicals into the wind to warn other trees, or maybe send electrical or chemical signals through an interconnected root system or shared fungus fibers.

On top of all the other wonderous things that trees do for us and can do, they also feel stress like us. They are very sensitive to changes to their environment, whether this disruption is caused by man or nature, it can cause a great deal of stress to a tree. In urban enviroments especially, we need to look after our trees, as they can easily be stressed due to competition for water, poor soil quality and overcrowding. Stress can inhibit a tree's growth and affect its photosynthesis cycle.

Trees are truly magnificent.