I like trees.  I am in awe of them.  

It’s worth remembering that trees are the largest living organism on earth… and some of the oldest living organisms. Bark is the outer part of a tree.  It’s a protective covering, like our skin is to us.  It protects the tree from injury, and on trees with very thick bark, like the Douglas fir, from temperature extremes. The moist, soft inner bark of a tree produces its annual rings.  It also serves as conduit for nutrients to the branches and trunk of the tree.  If bark is injured or cut down to the wood all the way around the tree, the tree can starve to death.

My pictures today are of the peeling bark of melaleuca quinuenervia.   Melaleuca, endemic mostly to Australia, is a genus of plants in the myrtle family.   They are sometimes called paperbark trees for obvious reasons.  When they are about three years old they begin to produce and store vast numbers of seeds which are stored in tightly closed woody capsules until some form of stress, such as frost, fire or human-induced injury, cause the capsules to open. In a single year a melaleuca can produce more than a million seeds.  It can store around 20 million.  When the woody capsule opens, seeds are dispersed by water and wind.

Some of my very good friends and I have been discussing evolution.  We’ve been exploring the implications in our individual and our loosely shared religious beliefs of our acceptance of the theory that trees and all other living organisms that exist today are the result of evolution. Shall I admit that in some mysterious way, I am glad to be related to the melaleuca tree which I photographed today… and to all things living. I am a teacher… was a teacher.  I am retired…  and I am appalled to learn that a significant number of American citizens are objecting, in the name of their Christian church, to including the theory of evolution in public school science classes. In some school districts, teachers of science are being required to include something called creationism in their science programs.