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Trees

Is fine chocolate slipping through our fingers?

The World of Chocolate

How to Save the Chocolate Tree Without Sacrificing Flavor

Demand, disease and climate change are threatening cocoa, but a new breed of clones could keep the treat abundant and tasty

You can thank these Theobroma cacao flowers for your brownie sundae.

The World of Chocolate

You Wouldn’t Have Chocolate Without Invisible Flies and Extreme Yeast

It takes a wild and temperamental menagerie to bring the beloved candy to store shelves. Bon appétit!

Cool Finds

A 10,000-Year-Old Forest Has Been Discovered, And It’s Under Water

Ancient oak trees found on the bottom of the North Sea represent a prehistoric woodland that likely spanned thousands of acres

Here is the artist's rendition of what a Tree of 40 Fruit will look like at 10 years.

Art Meets Science

A Tree Grows 40 Different Types of Fruit

What started as an art project has become a mission to reintroduce Americans to native fruits that have faded from popularity

Cool Finds

Get Past the Vile Smell: Ginkgo Nuts Are Delicious

People have been feasting on these tasty little morsels since at least the 11th century

Douglas firs in the American West.

Cool Finds

Extreme Drought in New Mexico Cost a 650-Year-Old Tree Its Life

The 7-foot-tall douglas fir named Yoda managed to weather many a drought over the centuries, but not this last one

A rock climber in Clifty Wilderness

Clifty Wilderness

Hemlock thickets, sandstone arches and scenic river vistas

Tropical regions are home to many unique species, such as this tiny frog belonging to the genus Dendrophryniscus that lives in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. A new study finds that removing just a few trees can quickly cause biodiversity in these tropical forests to fall.

New Research

Removing Just a Few Trees Can Lower Tropical Animal Biodiversity

Selective logging can halve the number of species of mammals and amphibians in a forest

This half-albino redwood tree has swirls of green and yellowish-white, as well as male and female cones.

Trending Today

Rare Half-Albino Redwood Tree Is Safe, For Now

One rare, half-albino redwood in California was slated to be chopped down, but local outcry has saved it

We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to mimic a mangrove tree, basically.

Trending Today

Texas Just Started Building the Largest Carbon Capture Facility Ever

The plant will soak up most of the emissions from its coal-fired power production

The small lakes that dot Russia's Yamal Peninsula were likely formed in the same was as the two strange holes.

Trending Today

That Weird Siberian Hole Has a Twin

Melting permafrost can change the land in really strange—and sometimes dangerous—ways

New Research

When Trees Are Cut Down, Angkor’s Temples Begin to Crumble

People usually think of trees’ destructive impacts on Angkor, but they also protect those iconic temples

This is one of the oldest living trees in the world

Cool Finds

Is This the Oldest Living Tree?

This Norway Spruce in Sweden has roots that are over 9,000 years old

An albino redwood in Humboldt Country.

Cool Finds

One of World’s Ten Albino Redwoods Might Be Cut Down

Preservationists in California, however, are fighting to save the tree

The Remnants of Prehistoric Plant Pollen Reveal that Humans Shaped Forests 11,000 Years Ago

The discoveries could boost indigenous populations’ claims to ancestral lands long thought to be untouched by human activity

California redwoods can live for more than a thousand years.

Save the Big Trees!

A large tree grows more quickly and sucks up a lot more carbon than a smaller one, scientists find

Santa could make his home on floating sea ice, but the Arctic may be ice free as early as 2016, according to the U.S. Navy.

Six Ways Climate Change Is Waging War on Christmas

If Santa really lived at the North Pole, he would have drowned long ago—his icy abode is slowly melting

Cut Down a Forest, Let It Grow Back, And Even 30 Years Later It’s Not the Same

In the tropics, secondary forests are often “ephemeral,” succumbing to deforestation every 10 years or so and thus never able to fully recover

None

How Trees Defined America

Historian Erik Rutkow argues in a new book that forests are key to understanding how our nation developed and who we are today

A biologists at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Jorge Santiago-Blay has gathered some 2,000 samples of amber and exudates from species found around the world and analyzed 1,245 of them.

Seeking the Origins of Amber

By studying the chemical signatures of living trees, Smithsonian’s Jorge Santiago-Blay intends to reconstruct ancient forests

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