Which Of The World's Trees Do You Find The Most Huggable?

[DistressedAmerican]

I rather love redwoods myself:loveya:.


But, I have long arms!

I also love the Ceiba tree:loveya:. The Ancient Maya believed that five of these beautiful trees held up the sky!


Here's One From An Ancient Maunscript From Central Mexico (Stees at each of the four sides. They also believed in one at the center not shown here.):


You?

[ET Awful]

1. I'd have to go with giant sequoias myself, but you have to

get 'em young, otherwise you can't get your arms around them.

[Technowitch]

2. We own 10 acres of redwoods (sequoia sempivirens)--

--and I'm not ashamed to admit I hug some of them from time to time.

;) Sometimes it even feels like they hug back.

[patrice]

3. I love trees.

have been known to hug a few in my time, around various of the best camp sites scattered around this country. Don't have any favorites. I like them all.

[CottonBear]

4. The 800 year old, virgin Tulip Poplars at Joyce Kilmer in NC.

Awesome.

[DistressedAmerican]

7. Very Nice!

[CottonBear]

19. I love the coast redwoods too!

I have a picture of me hugging one (as much as one can hug one since they are so HUGE!)when I was way up in Northern California visting friends. Those groves are just magical!

I'll have to say the forests of the Southeastern US (the North GA, Eastern TN and NC and SC mountains in particular) are my favorites.

[frictionlessO]

5. I'll go witrh ya on the Redwoods (redheads of trees!) but Im also

into hugging big multigeneration Willows the kind with half a dozen older ones from same tree fallen on top of eachother... Also love Maples but you have to be acreful when you hug 'em otherwise they get excited and sticky.

[scarlet_owl]

6. The big hackberry in front of our nature center.

It's my most favorite tree in the whole world!

[Sanity Claws]

8. Lilac trees

I have two in my backyard and they're great. They're so fragrant and beautiful when in bloom.

[DistressedAmerican]

16. Lilacs Are Great! There Were Some Outside My House When I Was A Kid

Smell Great!!!

[DIKB]

9. I always thought

that Weeping Willows needed a hug :)

[Goathead]

10. Giant sequoia

A bit wider than the coastal redwood

[MuseRider]

11. Catalpas.

My favorite and they grow wild around here. Tall, often gnarly with a lot of character. Great big heart shaped leaves and beautiful, orchid like flowers in the spring. They do have messy pods but I have used the seeds from those pods to start trees for all my friends. I love them.

[bertha katzenengel]

12. I love redwoods too, but since there are none around here, I am partial

to dogwoods, which are currently blooming in breath-taking fashion:



a blossom up close

[DELUSIONAL]

13. Palm trees

[Lisa]

14. very large, elderly sassafras trees ...

No sticky sap or pitch -- and I sometimes think I can smell a spicy undertone.

[DistressedAmerican]

15. Here Are A Couple From My Grandma!

[barb162]

17. all of them

[Sanity Claws]

18. Horse chestnut and hawthorn

I just remembered these beautiful trees. Horse chestnuts can bloom with pale red or ivory colored flowers. They're huge and quite beautiful. Hawthorns are smaller and have beautiful red fruit. There used to be a lot of hawthorns in my neighborhood but apparently they are not as disease resistant as other trees and we've lost some.
What a nice topic -- I haven't thought of these trees and their beauty in some time.

[skygazer]

20. Redwoods are awesome trees

But I feel a little unsure hugging them - they're very dignified trees. I touch them reverently as I pass them - we are surrounded by Redwoods here and I gaze at them in awe as I walk to the mailbox in the afternoon. I never get sick of it.

I like to hug Maple trees. Sugar Maples, to be exact. I grew up in Vermont and the smell of boiling sap is etched into my brain from a young age. We used to hitch up a horse and go collect the sap in the spring, wading through hip-deep snow to get to the buckets hanging off the trees. My father taught me from a young age to respect and revere the trees and I tend to thank them for what they're giving.

Trees are wonderful. I wouldn't want to live in a place where trees don't grow.

[jmowreader]

21. I hug the Lignum Vitae

This is a tree that is grown commercially in Argentina. It was once on the CITES endangered species list and completely illegal for international trade, but now it's farmed and has FSC certification. Ask for the FSC certification data when you buy this material.

Lignum Vitae is Latin for "the wood of life." It supposedly has medicinal qualities. Unfortunately, one of them seems to be memory improvement: if one of your troops forgets to fill his canteen, you whack him upside the head with a piece of this wood and he'll remember to come to formation with a full canteen next time.

The Lignum Vitae tree (Bulnesia sarmientoi) produces a wood that is hard, dense and oily. The measure of a wood's hardness is the Janka scale--the pressure, in pounds, needed to force a .444" diameter steel ball half its diameter into the wood. The hardest wood you'll usually run into is rock maple, which has a 1450 Janka rating. Mesquite, which is another ungodly-hard wood, has a 2345 Janka rating. Ipe, which is the latest fad among high-end deck builders, has a 3500 Janka rating and it's so goddamn hard you have to predrill your nail holes. Lignum vitae has a 4500 Janka rating--slightly softer than mild steel.

Lignum vitae's density is 1.37--the densest wood in the world. Ebony, mountain mahogany and desert ironwood are the other three woods that have specific gravities above 1.00--which means none of them will float in water.

The tree is very small--market size is 20 to 30 feet tall with a 12-inch trunk.

Lignum vitae was long used for police nightsticks because it gets your point across better than any other wood, but after the wood made the CITES list the police switched to aluminum batons. While it was on the list, one of the few acceptable uses of it was as propeller bushings for ocean-going vessels--specifically submarines. It exudes oil like teak does, but teak only has a 1000 Janka rating. (Black walnut has a 1010 Janka rating, and it's hard as hell.) It's also non-contaminating to foods, so it's a good choice if you're making a bearing for a stone-grinding machine for grains.

[DistressedAmerican]

22. Kick For The Tree Huggers!

[DistressedAmerican]

23. Trees Love Morning Kicks!

I AM THE LORAX!

[jpgray]

24. Oak fer me (nt)