There are no more trees in the forest. Why are forests in Siberia young? Natural thinning of forest plantations
Russia is the world's largest forest power. It is all the more surprising that our forests are very young, they are no more than 200 years old.
They should live and live
I first thought about this while looking at the paintings of I.I. Shishkina. Something about them alarmed me. And one day I realized: beautiful forest in all the paintings it looks little like a dense animal; rather, it depicts young animals. Why didn’t the artist capture the forest with the old people, centuries-old trees? Yes, because in those years there was no such forest on Russian territory.
In order for the reader to have an understanding of how long a tree can live, I will tell you the age of some trees. Olive lives 2000 years, royal oak - 2000, yew - 2000, juniper - 1700-2000 years, oak - 500-900, cedar pine - 1200 years, sycamore maple - 1100, Siberian larch - 700-900, Siberian cedar - 850, linden – 800, spruce – 300, birch – 100–120 years. The main characters of our forests are pine, spruce, birch, and oak.
According to researchers from the Polar Alpine Botanical Garden-Institute A.V. Kuzmina and O.A. Goncharova, average age trees Murmansk region about 150 years. The picture is similar throughout Russia. Don't believe me? Get out into the forest and try to find at least one tree older than 200–300 years. It won't work. And such a tree would be visible from afar. For example, a spruce of this age should have a diameter of at least two meters! According to archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Arkaim, in Chelyabinsk region grew coniferous forests with trees over five meters in diameter!
There are historical sources indicating that our forests should be more mature. Travelers of the 18th century reported large oak trees in Valdai. There are also earlier sources. Alberto Campenze (1490–1542), a Dutch writer, reported on Muscovy in a letter addressed to Pope Clement VII: “In general, they have much more woods than we do. Pines are incredibly large, so one tree is enough for the mast itself. big ship" IN official history Until the 18th century, the entire territory of Russia was called Muscovy. Hence the natural question: where are trees over 500 years old on Russian territory? There is none of them. There are, of course, individual specimens preserved thanks to man. For example, the so-called Peter's oaks in the Moscow Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve, which are about 500 years old.
Massive rejuvenation
The Tale of Bygone Years mentions a huge forest area - the Okovsky forest, the remains of which are located in the southwestern part of the Tver region. This was written chronicle around 1110–1118. It turns out that the trees in the Okovsky forest must be at least 900 years old, and if we take into account that the forest was already standing at the time of writing “The Tale” and the events described in it, then the age of some species must be more than 1000 years. The basis of the Okovsky forest were spruce and oak trees. According to tree age tables, old forest should be here. But in the forests of the Tver region, the average age of trees is again about 150 years.
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In a normal forest there should be both old trees and young ones, just like in the photo late XIX- early twentieth century - deforestation in Humboldt County, California. Notice - thick trees next to thin trees, that is, old trees with young trees. But... Why are there no tree tops? As if the forest had undergone some kind of catastrophic impact. We can see a similar picture in the photo of the site where the Tunguska meteorite fell in 1908. At that time, a forest covering an area of 2000 km² was felled in Siberia. But the most interesting thing is that there are no old trees at the site where the Tunguska body fell large diameter. That is, at that time a young forest was growing in Siberia! But the main forest reserves of Russia are concentrated in Siberia.
Another proof of the youth of our forests - wide use birches As you know, many of their species grow in clearings, burnt areas, and wastelands. Average duration The life of a birch is 100–120 years. If we start from the average age of forests at 150 years, it turns out that most of Russia’s forests were subjected to catastrophic destruction around 1840–1870. But, most likely, the most accurate date is 1810–1815. After the destruction of the forests, the land was completely a burnt area. And only by 1840 did their full-scale restoration begin. In place of the so-called deforestation, new young growth grew.
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What does science say?
It’s worth immediately abandoning the version that forests were destroyed by cutting down for economic needs: for kindling or construction of housing. Yes, the forest was used by humans. For example, during the time of Catherine II, trade in ship timber flourished. Oak trees were used, according to the German traveler Adam Olearius (1599–1671), “for ritual fire in honor of Perun the Thunderer.” But it is impossible to destroy a forest on the territory of, say, the Tver region in a short period of time. Yes, Russian people did not treat the forest so barbarically. For him, the forest has always been his breadwinner. Picking mushrooms, berries, medicinal plants, hunting, beekeeping - part of the way of life, a way of survival in years of crop failure. The forest is an integral part of the folklore and mythology of the Rus. Pain-boshka, Borovik, Leshy, Moss-haired Man and other characters lived there.
The version of natural fires also does not stand up to criticism. The forest cannot burn all over Russia at the same time. Only if fires are caused artificially. Let me remind you that in 2010, 2 million hectares of forest burned in 20 regions of the country. Experts immediately called this event a disaster, and alternative researchers said that the forest was set on fire artificially, including from space satellites.
Official science recognizes the youth of forests in Russia. Science also recognizes, for example, that Siberian larch currently grows mainly in burnt areas. A study of the boundaries of its age showed interesting results: trees under 50 years old - 7.1%; 51–100 years old – 3.7%; 101–200 years – 68%; 201–299 years old – 20.5%; over 300 years – 0.7%. The age of the main mass of larch is 101–200 years. And according to the age table, Siberian larch is listed as a long-liver and under normal conditions should reach an age of 700–900 years. Where are these long-livers in their native forests? Logically modern science- burned out. Because " Forest fires are the main mechanism for renewing forests, replacing old trees with young trees,” so natural fires do not allow trees to live to an old age. However, there is such a unique natural spring wood like bog oak or, in other words, “ ebony" It is mined from the depths of rivers and swamps, in places where oak grew many thousands of years ago. The wood acquires its black color after staining for more than 1000 years. The diameter of some specimens is sometimes more than two meters! This means that modern oaks can and should be much older and, accordingly, larger.
Alexey Kozhin
Photography - shutterstock.com ©
Read the continuation in the June issue (No. 6, 2015) of the magazine “Miracles and Adventures”
Another notch for memory. Is everything presented honestly and objectively in the official history?
Most of our forests are young. They are between a quarter and a third of their lives. Apparently, in the 19th century certain events occurred that led to the almost total destruction of our forests. Our forests keep big secrets...
It was a wary attitude towards Alexei Kungurov’s statements about Perm forests and clearings at one of his conferences that prompted me to conduct this research. Well, of course! There was a mysterious hint of hundreds of kilometers of clearings in the forests and their age. I personally was hooked by the fact that I walk through the forest quite often and quite far, but I didn’t notice anything unusual.
And this time the amazing feeling was repeated - the more you understand, the more new questions appear. I had to re-read a lot of sources, from materials on forestry of the 19th century to modern “ Instructions for carrying out forest management in the Russian forest fund" This did not add clarity, rather the opposite. But there was confidence that things are dirty here.
First amazing fact, which was confirmed - dimension quarterly network. By definition, a quarterly network is “ A system of forest blocks created on lands forest fund for the purpose of inventorying the forest fund, organizing and maintaining forestry and forest management».
The quarterly network consists of quarterly clearings. This is a straight strip cleared of trees and shrubs (usually up to 4 m wide), laid in the forest to mark the boundaries of forest blocks. During forest management, quarterly clearings are cut and cleared to a width of 0.5 m, and their expansion to 4 m is carried out in subsequent years by forestry workers.
Fig.2
In the picture you can see what these clearings look like in Udmurtia. The picture was taken from the Google Earth program ( see Fig.2). The blocks are rectangular in shape. For measurement accuracy, a segment of 5 blocks wide is marked. It was 5340 m, which means that the width of 1 block is 1067 meters, or exactly 1 way mile. The quality of the picture leaves much to be desired, but I myself walk along these clearings all the time, and what you see from above I know well from the ground. Until that moment, I was firmly convinced that all these forest roads were the work of Soviet foresters. But why the hell did they need to mark out the neighborhood network? in versts?
I checked. The instructions state that blocks should be 1 by 2 km in size. The error at this distance is allowed no more than 20 meters. But 20 is not 340. However, all forest management documents stipulate that if block network projects already exist, then you should simply link to them. This is understandable; the work of laying clearings is a lot of work to redo.
Fig.3
Today there are already machines for cutting down glades (see. Fig.3), but we should forget about them, since almost the entire forest fund of the European part of Russia, plus part of the forest beyond the Urals, approximately to Tyumen, is divided into a verst block network. There are also kilometer ones, of course, because in last century The foresters were also doing something, but mostly on the milepost. In particular, in Udmurtia there are no kilometer-long clearings. This means that the design and practical construction of a block network in most of the forest areas of the European part of Russia were completed no later than 1918. It was at this time that the metric system of measures was adopted for mandatory use in Russia, and the mile gave way to the kilometer.
It turns out made with axes and jigsaws, if we, of course, correctly understand historical reality. Considering that the forest area of the European part of Russia is about 200 million hectares, this is titanic work. Calculations show that the total length of the clearings is about 3 million km. For clarity, imagine the first lumberjack, armed with a saw or an ax. In a day he will be able to clear on average no more than 10 meters of clearing. But we must not forget that this work can be carried out mainly in winter time. This means that even 20,000 lumberjacks, working annually, would create our excellent verst-block network for at least 80 years.
But there has never been such a number of workers involved in forest management. Based on articles from the 19th century, it is clear that there were always very few forestry specialists, and the funds allocated for these purposes could not cover such expenses. Even if we imagine that for this purpose peasants were driven from surrounding villages to do free work, it is still unclear who did this in sparsely populated areas Perm, Kirov, Vologda regions.
After this fact, it is no longer so surprising that the entire neighborhood network is tilted by about 10 degrees and is not directed towards the geographic North Pole, and, apparently, to magnetic ( The markings were carried out using a compass, not a GPS navigator), which should have been located approximately 1000 kilometers towards Kamchatka at that time. And it’s not so confusing that the magnetic pole, according to official data from scientists, has never been there from the 17th century to the present day. It’s no longer scary that even today the compass needle points in approximately the same direction in which the quarterly network was made before 1918. All this cannot happen anyway! All logic falls apart.
But it is there. And in order to finish off the consciousness clinging to reality, I inform you that all this equipment also needs to be serviced. According to the norms, a complete audit takes place every 20 years. If it passes at all. And during this period of time, the “forest user” must monitor the clearings. Well, if in Soviet time If anyone was watching, it’s unlikely that over the past 20 years. But the clearings were not overgrown. There is a windbreak, but there are no trees in the middle of the road.
But in 20 years, a pine seed that accidentally fell to the ground, of which billions are sown annually, grows up to 8 meters in height. Not only are the clearings not overgrown, you won’t even see stumps from periodic clearings. This is all the more striking in comparison with power lines, which special teams regularly clear of overgrown bushes and trees.
Fig.4
This is what typical clearings in our forests look like. Grass, sometimes there are bushes, but no trees. There are no signs of regular maintenance (see. Fig.4 And Fig.5).
Fig.5
Second big mystery- this is the age of our forest, or the trees in this forest. In general, let's go in order. First, let's figure out how long a tree lives. Here is the corresponding table.
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* In brackets are height and life expectancy in particularly favorable conditions.
IN different sources the numbers are slightly different, but not significantly. Pine and spruce should live up to 300...400 years under normal conditions. You begin to understand how absurd everything is only when you compare the diameter of such a tree with what we see in our forests. A 300-year-old spruce should have a trunk with a diameter of about 2 meters. Well, like in a fairy tale. The question arises: Where are all these giants? No matter how much I walk through the forest, I haven’t seen anything thicker than 80 cm. There aren’t many of them. There are individual copies (in Udmurtia - 2 pines) which reach 1.2 m, but their age is also no more than 200 years.
In general, how does the forest live? Why do trees grow or die in it?
It turns out that there is a concept of “natural forest”. This is a forest that lives its own life - it has not been cut down. It has a distinctive feature - low crown density from 10 to 40%. That is, some trees were already old and tall, but some of them fell affected by fungus or died, losing competition with their neighbors for water, soil and light. Large gaps form in the forest canopy. A lot of light begins to get there, which is very important in the forest struggle for existence, and young animals begin to actively grow. Therefore, a natural forest consists of different generations, and crown density is the main indicator of this.
But if the forest was clear-cut, then new trees for a long time grow simultaneously, crown density is high, more than 40%. Several centuries will pass, and if the forest is not touched, then the struggle for a place in the sun will do its job. It will become natural again. Do you want to know how much natural forest there is in our country that is not affected by anything? Please, map of Russian forests (see. Fig.6).
Fig.6
Bright shades indicate forests with a high canopy density, that is, these are not “natural forests.” And these are the majority. All European part indicated by saturated blue. This is as indicated in the table: " Small-leaved and mixed forests. Forests with a predominance of birch, aspen, gray alder, often with an admixture of coniferous trees or with isolated areas coniferous forests. Almost all of them are derivative forests, formed on the site of primary forests as a result of logging, clearing, and forest fires».
On the mountains and tundra zone You don’t have to stop there, the rarity of crowns there may be due to other reasons. But the plains and middle lane covers clearly a young forest. How young? Go and check it out. It is unlikely that you will find a tree in the forest that is older than 150 years. Even a standard drill for determining the age of a tree is 36 cm long and is designed for a tree age of 130 years. How does forest science explain this? Here's what they came up with:
« Forest fires are a fairly common occurrence in most parts of the world. taiga zone European Russia. Moreover: forest fires in the taiga are so common that some researchers consider the taiga as a lot of burnt areas of different ages- more precisely, many forests formed on these burnt areas. Many researchers believe that forest fires are, if not the only, then at least, main by natural mechanism renewal of forests, replacement of old generations of trees with young ones…»
All this is called " dynamics of random violations" That's where the dog is buried. The forest was burning, and burning almost everywhere. And this, according to experts, main reason the age of our forests. Not fungus, not bugs, not hurricanes. Our entire taiga is in burnt areas, and after a fire, what remains is the same as after clear cutting. Hence the high crown density throughout almost the entire forest zone. Of course, there are exceptions - truly untouched forests in the Angara region, on Valaam and, probably, somewhere else in the vast expanses of our vast Motherland. It's really fabulous there big trees in its entirety. And although these are small islands in the vast sea of taiga, they prove that a forest can be like that.
What is so common about forest fires that over the past 150...200 years they have burned the entire forest area of 700 million hectares? Moreover, according to scientists, in a certain checkerboard order, observing the order, and certainly at different times?
First we need to understand the scale of these events in space and time. The fact that the main age of old trees in the bulk of forests is at least 100 years old suggests that the large-scale burns that so rejuvenated our forests occurred over a period of no more than 100 years. Translating into dates, for the 19th century alone. For this 7 million hectares of forest had to be burned annually.
Even as a result of large-scale forest arson in the summer of 2010, which all experts called catastrophic in volume, burned only 2 million hectares. It turns out nothing" so ordinary"This is not the case. The last justification for such a burned-out past of our forests could be the tradition of slash-and-burn agriculture. But how, in this case, can we explain the state of the forest in places where traditionally agriculture was not developed? In particular, in Perm region? Moreover, this method of farming involves labor-intensive cultural use of limited areas of forest, and not at all the unrestrained burning of large tracts in hot weather. summer time, yes with the breeze.
Having gone through everything possible options, we can say with confidence that the scientific concept " dynamics of random violations"nothing in real life is not justified, and is a myth designed to disguise the inadequate state of the current forests of Russia, and therefore the events that led to this.
We will have to admit that our forests are either beyond any norm) and constantly burned throughout the 19th century ( which in itself is inexplicable and not recorded anywhere), or burned at the same time as a result of some incident, which he vehemently denies scientific world, having no arguments other than that in official nothing like this is recorded in history.
To all this we can add that there were clearly fabulously large trees in old natural forests. It has already been said about the preserved areas of the taiga. It is worth giving an example in part deciduous forests. IN Nizhny Novgorod region and in Chuvashia it is very favorable climate For hardwood trees. grows there great amount oak trees But, again, you won’t find old copies. The same 150 years, no older.
Older single copies are all the same. At the beginning of the article there is a photograph of the largest oak tree in Belarus. It grows in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (see. Fig.1). Its diameter is about 2 meters, and its age is estimated at 800 years, which, of course, is very arbitrary. Who knows, maybe he somehow survived the fires, this happens. The largest oak tree in Russia is considered to be a specimen growing in the Lipetsk region. According to conventional estimates, he is 430 years old (see. Fig.7).
Fig.7
A special theme is bog oak. This is the one that is extracted mainly from the bottom of rivers. My relatives from Chuvashia told me that they pulled out huge specimens up to 1.5 m in diameter from the bottom. And there were many of them (see Fig.8). This indicates the composition of the former oak forest, the remains of which lie at the bottom. This means that nothing prevents current oak trees from growing to such sizes. Did the “dynamics of random disturbances” in the form of thunderstorms and lightning work in some special way before? No, everything was the same. So it turns out that the current forest simply has not yet reached maturity.
Fig.8
Let's summarize what we learned from this study. There are a lot of contradictions between the reality that we see with our own eyes and the official interpretation of the relatively recent past:
There is a developed neighborhood network over a vast area, which was designed in miles and was laid no later than 1918. The length of the clearings is such that 20,000 loggers, provided manual labor, it would take 80 years to create it. The clearings are maintained very irregularly, if at all, but they do not become overgrown.
On the other hand, according to historians and surviving articles on forestry, there was no funding of comparable scale and the required number of forestry specialists at that time. There was no way to recruit such a quantity of free labor. There was no mechanization to facilitate this work.
We need to choose: either our eyes deceive us, or the 19th century was not at all what historians tell us. In particular, there could be mechanization commensurate with the tasks described. What interesting purpose could this steam engine from the film “ Siberian barber" (cm. Fig.9). Or is Mikhalkov a completely unimaginable dreamer?
Fig.9
There could also have been less labor-intensive, efficient technologies for laying and maintaining clearings, which are lost today ( some distant analogue of herbicides). It is probably stupid to say that Russia has not lost anything since 1917. Finally, it is possible that clearings were not cut, but trees were planted in blocks in areas destroyed by fire. This is not such nonsense compared to what science tells us. Although doubtful, it at least explains a lot.
Our forests are much younger than the natural lifespan of the trees themselves. This is evidenced by the official map of Russian forests and our eyes. The age of the forest is about 150 years, although pine and spruce under normal conditions grow up to 400 years and reach 2 meters in thickness. There are also separate areas of forest with trees of similar age.
According to experts, all our forests are burnt. It is fires, in their opinion, that do not give trees a chance to survive to natural age. Experts do not even allow the thought of the simultaneous destruction of vast expanses of forest, believing that such an event could not go unnoticed. In order to justify this ashes, official science adopted the theory “ dynamics of random violations" This theory suggests that forest fires that destroy ( according to some strange schedule) up to 7 million hectares of forest per year, although in 2010 even 2 million hectares, destroyed as a result of deliberate forest fires, were called a disaster.
We need to choose: either our eyes are deceiving us again, or some grandiose events of the 19th century with particular impudence were not reflected in the official version of our past, as it didn’t fit into it nor Great Tartaria, nor the Great Northern Route. Atlantis with the fallen moon and even then they didn’t fit. One-time destruction 200...400 million hectares forests are even easier to imagine and hide than the undying, 100-year-old fire proposed for consideration by science.
So what's it about? age-old sadness Belovezhskaya Pushcha? Is it not about those severe wounds of the earth that the young forest covers? After all, gigantic fires by themselves don't happen...
Forests are one of the most valuable resources of our vast Motherland. Forest occupies about 45% of the territory and accounts for about 24% of the entire planet's reserves. The most common forests in Russia are coniferous trees, such as larch, pine, spruce and cedar. But in the European part, deciduous and mixed ones are still more common.
It is known that many trees live several times longer than a person, but few people think that there are plants that took root long before the creation of the Egyptian pyramids and survived the rise and fall of more than one human civilization.
It is precisely established that on our planet there are about 50 trees whose age exceeds the 1000-year mark. In reality, there are much more such plants, since many of them are located in hard-to-reach areas, and it is not possible to carry out their examination.
The oldest tree on the planet is the bristlecone pine, growing in California. national forest Inio. The tree is about 5000 years old. To protect him, information about his exact location is not disclosed.
One of oldest trees our country has the Grunwald oak, growing in Kaliningrad region, the tree is more than 800 years old. Among the two dozen oldest trees in Russia, there is an oak in Chuvashia aged 480 years, a 400-year-old oak on the Don and a 700-year-old plane tree in Dagestan. In addition, in Yakutia, scientists discovered an entire area of Cajander larches (Larix cajanderi), among which more than a dozen trees are aged from 750 to 885 years.
However, latest methods tree age dating suggests that the longest-lived of all trees on Earth are TISS s.
Yews are relics that have reached their maximum development in the tertiary period, now they are extremely rare and scattered. The yew genus belongs to the yew family and includes 8 species growing mainly in the Northern Hemisphere: Europe, Asia, North America.
In Russia, yew is represented by two types: berry yew (also known as common or European - Taxus baccata) - grows in the Caucasus, Kaliningrad region. both in the Crimea, and yew spiky - grows in the Khabarovsk and Primorsky territories.
In the Khosta area near Sochi on Black Sea coast Caucasus, there is a yew-boxwood grove in which 600-1000-year-old yews grow.
Abroad, the age of the oldest yew in Scotland in Fortingall is estimated at nine thousand years. In England, in the county of Kent, there grows a yew tree with a diameter of 490 cm. When the pyramids were built in Egypt, this yew was already a quite decent mature tree.
One of the oldest yews in Central Europe is considered to be a tree growing near the Czech city of Havlicuv Bord, its height is up to 25 meters, and its age is more than 2000 years.
Perhaps the tallest and oldest yew in the Caucasus currently growing is the Adjarian yew in Georgia. Its height is 32.5 meters, its trunk diameter is 2.5 meters, its age is about 4000 years.
It can be difficult to accurately determine the age of yews. After four hundred to five hundred years of life, the trunk becomes hollow, and calculate the life time according to tree rings impossible. The main parameters in such cases, which make it possible to estimate the lifespan of trees, are their height and trunk diameter.
In the mountains of Crimea, yews usually do not rise above a thousand meters above sea level (the tree does not like frost). Prefers soils that are fresh, nutritious, rich in lime - dolomites, limestones, marls.
Knowing the barbaric nature of some bipeds, yews climb into deserted places and reluctantly allow erectus to approach them. These relics can be found in secluded places on the southern steep slopes of the Main Ridge under the canopy of beech and hornbeam forests.
The first time we found two relict tree quite by accident, having lost the path in the mountains near Sevastopol.
Every time we returned to this place again and again, a new more ancient giant. It was as if the trees were making sure that we did not want to harm them.
On the 5th or 6th time of our visit, a real ancient beauty was revealed to us. Height - 18-19 m, diameter - 104 cm (circumference - 3 m 25 cm), which means that The relic is about 2000 years old!
The tree is not hollow, healthy and strong. It seemed to us that this was the limit!
And imagine our surprise when the next time the patriarch of this grove revealed himself to us. Judging by its height - 24-25 meters and trunk diameter - 130 cm (circumference 4m 07cm) this tree is 2500-3000 (two and a half - three thousand) years old!
This is the oldest tree in Russia! Its age is 2500-3000 years
LINK
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Yew (Yew) - Tree of Resurrection, Tree of Eternity. From the book “Celtic Wisdom of Trees.” Jane Gifford ©.
Tiss guards the gate between this life and the future life, and also protects people from the evil spirits of the heavenly world. Since ancient times, the yew, as the sacred Tree of Immortality, has been associated with burial sites, where it protects and purifies the dead. In Brittany they believe that cemetery yews are connected by their roots to the mouth of each of the bodies resting around them. The ancient custom of placing yew branches under the shroud of the deceased was considered a means of protecting the immortal soul of the deceased on the way to the Underworld. In ancient Greece and Rome, the yew was dedicated to Hecate, whose cult spread all the way to Scotland. The potion bubbling in the famous witches' cauldron from Shakespeare's Macbeth contains "collected during lunar eclipse» yew shoots. Hamlet's uncle, in order to kill the king, pours poisonous, “twice deadly yew” into his ear.
The Irish Ollavs revered the yew more than any other tree. The yew, like the tree of life and death, was called “The Glory of Banba.” The ancient Celts gave yew other names. The name “Spell of Knowledge” speaks for itself, and the title “ Royal ring"is said to be related to a brooch that symbolized the changing cycles of existence. The brooch was worn by the rulers of the Celts to constantly remind them of the inevitability of death and subsequent rebirth. The yew was a symbol of the changing of these cycles.
The Druids believed that yew was able to overcome the boundaries of time. In the rituals of the Druids, the yew personified high degree priesthood called Ovate. To be initiated into Ovate, the aspirant had to go through a symbolic death in order to be reborn with new knowledge that has no boundaries and is beyond time. Thus, the yew became a means of direct communication with the ancestors and the kingdom of the spirit, where angels and intercessors live who can help each of us
The mystical aura surrounding the yew further strengthened faith in him. magical power. And the formation of prejudices was helped by the inherent fear of death in all people and the use of yew as a weapon and deadly poison.
In many legends, yew appears as a symbol of unhappy love, when lovers are united only by death (the legend of Tristan and Isolde).
Like a tree, whose lifespan not only exceeds the lifespan of other trees, but also overlaps most history of people, yew serves as a symbol of the highest wisdom.
For christian church The yew became the tree of resurrection - a symbol of Jesus Christ rising from the tomb after the crucifixion.
Thiess talks about brevity human life and that most of our affairs are short-lived and eventually turn out to be untenable. And the last, general lesson of yew and the pinnacle of our spiritual path is the understanding that death is more significant than all other events of our existence.
P.S.
Warning: All parts of yew are extremely poisonous!
Yew secretes a deadly poison that was coated on arrowheads, making the arrows doubly lethal. The poison is absorbed literally in minutes. In small doses, it slows the heartbeat, can cause collapse and cause gastroenteritis. Even in small doses, the poison can lead to sudden death. The poison is distributed evenly throughout the plant, and the older the needles, the more poisonous it is.
P.P.S.
Wild yew berry is protected throughout the world. As an ancient relic and a unique natural monument, it deserves the most careful protection and breeding; the plant is listed in the Red Book of Russia, its damage is strictly prohibited.
Most of our forests are young. They are between a quarter and a third of their lives. Apparently, in the 19th century certain events occurred that led to the almost total destruction of our forests. Our forests keep big secrets...
I understand your age-old sadness...
It was a wary attitude towards Alexei Kungurov’s statements about Perm forests and clearings at one of his conferences that prompted me to conduct this research. Well, of course! There was a mysterious hint of hundreds of kilometers of clearings in the forests and their age. I personally was hooked by the fact that I walk through the forest quite often and quite far, but I didn’t notice anything unusual.
And this time the amazing feeling was repeated - the more you understand, the more new questions appear. I had to re-read a lot of sources, from materials on forestry of the 19th century, to the modern “Instructions for carrying out forest management in the forest fund of Russia.” This did not add clarity, rather the opposite. But there was confidence that things are dirty here.
The first surprising fact that was confirmed is the dimension quarterly network. A quarter network, by definition, is “a system of forest quarters created on forest fund lands for the purpose of inventorying the forest fund, organizing and maintaining forestry and forest management.”
The quarterly network consists of quarterly clearings. This is a straight strip cleared of trees and shrubs (usually up to 4 m wide), laid in the forest to mark the boundaries of forest blocks. During forest management, quarterly clearings are cut and cleared to a width of 0.5 m, and their expansion to 4 m is carried out in subsequent years by forestry workers.
In the picture you can see what these clearings look like in Udmurtia. The picture was taken from the program Google Earth.
The blocks are rectangular in shape. For measurement accuracy, a segment of 5 blocks wide is marked. It was 5340 m, which means that the width of 1 block is 1067 meters, or exactly 1 way mile. The quality of the picture leaves much to be desired, but I myself walk along these clearings all the time, and what you see from above I know well from the ground. Until that moment, I was firmly convinced that all these forest roads were the work of Soviet foresters. But why the hell did they need to mark out the neighborhood network? in versts?
I checked. The instructions state that blocks should be 1 by 2 km in size. The error at this distance is allowed no more than 20 meters. But 20 is not 340. However, all forest management documents stipulate that if block network projects already exist, then you should simply link to them. This is understandable; the work of laying clearings is a lot of work to redo.
Today there are already machines for cutting down glades (see. rice. higher), but we should forget about them, since almost the entire forest fund of the European part of Russia, plus part of the forest beyond the Urals, approximately to Tyumen, is divided into a verst block network. There are also kilometer-long ones, of course, because in the last century foresters have also been doing something, but mostly it’s the mile-long one. In particular, in Udmurtia there are no kilometer-long clearings. This means that the design and practical construction of a block network in most of the forest areas of the European part of Russia were completed no later than 1918. It was at this time that the metric system of measures was adopted for mandatory use in Russia, and the mile gave way to the kilometer.
It turns out made with axes and jigsaws, if we, of course, correctly understand historical reality. Considering that the forest area of the European part of Russia is about 200 million hectares, this is titanic work. Calculations show that the total length of the clearings is about 3 million km. For clarity, imagine the first lumberjack, armed with a saw or an ax. In a day he will be able to clear on average no more than 10 meters of clearing. But we must not forget that this work can be carried out mainly in winter. This means that even 20,000 lumberjacks, working annually, would create our excellent verst-block network for at least 80 years.
But there has never been such a number of workers involved in forest management. Based on articles from the 19th century, it is clear that there were always very few forestry specialists, and the funds allocated for these purposes could not cover such expenses. Even if we imagine that for this purpose peasants were driven from surrounding villages to do free work, it is still unclear who did this in the sparsely populated areas of the Perm, Kirov, and Vologda regions.
After this fact, it is no longer so surprising that the entire neighborhood network is tilted by about 10 degrees and is directed not to the geographic north pole, but, apparently, to the magnetic one (the markings were carried out using a compass, not a GPS navigator), which should have been during this time. time to be located approximately 1000 kilometers towards Kamchatka. And it’s not so confusing that the magnetic pole, according to official data from scientists, has never been there from the 17th century to the present day. It’s no longer scary that even today the compass needle points in approximately the same direction in which the quarterly network was made before 1918. All this cannot happen anyway! All logic falls apart.
But it is there. And in order to finish off the consciousness clinging to reality, I inform you that all this equipment also needs to be serviced. According to the norms, a complete audit takes place every 20 years. If it passes at all. And during this period of time, the “forest user” must monitor the clearings. Well, if anyone was watching in Soviet times, it’s unlikely that over the past 20 years. But the clearings are not overgrown. There is a windbreak, but there are no trees in the middle of the road. But in 20 years, a pine seed that accidentally fell to the ground, of which billions are sown annually, grows up to 8 meters in height. Not only are the clearings not overgrown, you won’t even see stumps from periodic clearings. This is all the more striking in comparison with power lines, which special teams regularly clear of overgrown bushes and trees.
This is what typical clearings in our forests look like. Grass, sometimes there are bushes, but no trees. There are no signs of regular maintenance.
The second big mystery is the age of our forest, or trees in this forest. In general, let's go in order. First, let's figure out how long a tree lives. Here is the corresponding table.
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* In brackets are height and life expectancy in particularly favorable conditions.
In different sources, the figures differ slightly, but not significantly. Pine and spruce should survive under normal conditions up to 300...400 years. You begin to understand how absurd everything is only when you compare the diameter of such a tree with what we see in our forests. A 300-year-old spruce should have a trunk with a diameter of about 2 meters. Well, like in a fairy tale. The question arises: Where are all these giants? No matter how much I walk through the forest, I haven’t seen anything thicker than 80 cm. There aren’t many of them. There are individual copies (in Udmurtia - 2 pine trees) which reach 1.2 m, but their age is also no more than 200 years.
In general, how does the forest live? Why do trees grow or die in it?
It turns out there is a concept "natural forest". This is a forest that lives its own life - it has not been cut down. It has a distinctive feature - low crown density from 10 to 40%. That is, some trees were already old and tall, but some of them fell affected by fungus or died, losing competition with their neighbors for water, soil and light. Large gaps form in the forest canopy. A lot of light begins to get there, which is very important in the forest struggle for existence, and young animals begin to actively grow. Therefore, a natural forest consists of different generations, and crown density is the main indicator of this.
But if the forest has been clear-cut, then new trees grow simultaneously for a long time, the crown density is high more than 40%. Several centuries will pass, and if the forest is not touched, then the struggle for a place in the sun will do its job. It will become natural again. Do you want to know how much natural forest there is in our country that is not affected by anything? Please, map of Russian forests.
Bright shades indicate forests with a high canopy density, that is, these are not “natural forests.” And these are the majority. The entire European part is indicated in rich blue. This is as shown in the table: “Small-leaved and mixed forests. Forests with a predominance of birch, aspen, gray alder, often with an admixture of coniferous trees or with separate areas of coniferous forests. Almost all of them are derivative forests, formed on the site of primary forests as a result of logging, clearing, and forest fires.”.
You don’t have to stop at the mountains and tundra zone; there the rarity of crowns may be due to other reasons. But the plains and middle zone are covered clearly a young forest. How young? Go and check it out. It is unlikely that you will find a tree in the forest that is older than 150 years. Even a standard drill for determining the age of a tree is 36 cm long and is designed for a tree age of 130 years. How does this explain forest science? Here's what they came up with:
“Forest fires are a fairly common phenomenon for most of the taiga zone of European Russia. Moreover: forest fires in the taiga are so common that some researchers consider the taiga as many burnt areas of different ages - more precisely, many forests formed on these burnt areas. Many researchers believe that forest fires are, if not the only, then at least the main natural mechanism for forest renewal, replacing old generations of trees with young ones..."
All this is called . That's where the dog is buried. The forest was burning, and was practically burning everywhere. And this, according to experts, is the main reason for the low age of our forests. Not fungus, not bugs, not hurricanes. Our entire taiga is in burnt areas, and after a fire, what remains is the same as after clear cutting. From here high crown density throughout almost the entire forest zone. Of course, there are exceptions - truly untouched forests in the Angara region, on Valaam and, probably, somewhere else in the vast expanses of our vast Motherland. There are really fabulously large trees there in their mass. And although these are small islands in the vast sea of taiga, they prove that the forest can be like this.
What is so common about forest fires that over the past 150...200 years they have burned the entire forest area of 700 million hectares? Moreover, according to scientists, in some checkerboard pattern observing the sequence, and certainly at different times?
First we need to understand the scale of these events in space and time. The fact that the main age of old trees in the bulk of forests is at least 100 years, suggests that large-scale fires, which so rejuvenated our forests, occurred over a period of no more than 100 years. Translating into dates, for one only 19th century. To do this it was necessary to burn annually 7 million hectares forests.
Even as a result of large-scale forest arson in the summer of 2010, which all experts called catastrophic in volume, only 2 million. hectares. It turns out there is nothing “so ordinary” about this. The last justification for such a burned-out past of our forests could be the tradition of slash-and-burn agriculture. But how, in this case, can we explain the state of the forest in places where traditionally agriculture was not developed? In particular, in the Perm region? Moreover, this method of farming involves labor-intensive cultural use of limited areas of forest, and not at all the uncontrolled burning of large tracts in the hot summer season, and with the wind.
Having gone through all possible options, we can say with confidence that the scientific concept “dynamics of random violations” nothing in real life not justified, and is myth, intended to disguise the inadequate state of the current forests of Russia, and therefore events that led to this.
We will have to admit that our forests either burned intensely (beyond any norm) and constantly throughout the 19th century (which in itself is inexplicable and not recorded anywhere), or burned down at one time as a result some incident, which is why the scientific world furiously denies it, having no arguments other than the fact that nothing like this is recorded in official history.
To all this we can add that there were clearly fabulously large trees in old natural forests. It has already been said about the preserved areas of the taiga. It is worth giving an example regarding deciduous forests. The Nizhny Novgorod region and Chuvashia have a very favorable climate for deciduous trees. There are a huge number of oak trees growing there. But, again, you won’t find old copies. The same 150 years, no older. Older single copies are all the same. There is a photograph at the beginning of the article the largest oak tree in Belarus. It grows in Belovezhskaya Pushcha.
Its diameter is about 2 meters, and its age is estimated at 800 years, which, of course, is very conditional. Who knows, maybe he somehow survived the fires, this happens.
The largest oak tree in Russia is considered to be a specimen growing in the Lipetsk region. According to conventional estimates, he 430 years.
A special theme is bog oak. This is the one that is extracted mainly from the bottom of rivers. My relatives from Chuvashia told me that they pulled out huge specimens up to 1.5 m in diameter from the bottom. And there were such a lot of.
This indicates the composition of the former oak forest, the remains of which lie at the bottom. This means that nothing prevents current oak trees from growing to such sizes. What, maybe earlier? “dynamics of random violations” did it work in a special way in the form of thunderstorms and lightning? No, everything was the same. So it turns out that the current forest simply has not yet reached maturity.
Let's summarize what we learned from this study. There are a lot of contradictions between the reality that we see with our own eyes and the official interpretation of the relatively recent past:
There is a developed block network over a vast area, which was designed in versts and was laid no later than 1918. The length of the clearings is such that 20,000 lumberjacks, using manual labor, would take 80 years to create it. The clearings are maintained very irregularly, if at all, but they do not become overgrown.
On the other hand, according to historians and surviving articles on forestry, there was no funding of comparable scale and the required number of forestry specialists then did not have. There was no way to recruit such a quantity of free labor. There was no mechanization to facilitate this work.
We need to choose: either our eyes deceive us, or The 19th century wasn't like that at all, as historians tell us. In particular, there could be mechanization, commensurate with the described tasks. It’s interesting what this steam engine from the film “The Barber of Siberia” could have been intended for.
Or is Mikhalkov a completely unimaginable dreamer?
There could also have been less labor-intensive, effective technologies for laying and maintaining clearings, which have been lost today (some distant analogue of herbicides). It is probably stupid to say that Russia has not lost anything since 1917. Finally, it is possible that clearings were not cut, but trees were planted in blocks in areas destroyed by fire. This is not such nonsense compared to what science tells us. Although doubtful, it at least explains a lot.
Our forests are much younger than the natural lifespan of the trees themselves. This is evidenced by the official map of Russian forests and our eyes. The age of the forest is about 150 years, although pine and spruce under normal conditions grow up to 400 years and reach 2 meters in thickness. There are also separate areas of forest with trees of similar age.
According to experts, all our forests are burnt. It is the fires in their opinion, do not give trees a chance to live to their natural age. Experts do not even allow the thought of the simultaneous destruction of vast expanses of forest, believing that such an event could not go unnoticed. In order to justify this ashes, official science adopted the theory of “dynamics of random disturbances.” This theory suggests that forest fires are considered a common occurrence, destroying (according to some incomprehensible schedule) up to 7 million hectares of forest per year, although in 2010 even 2 million hectares destroyed as a result of deliberate forest fires were called catastrophe.
We need to choose: either our eyes are deceiving us again, or some grandiose events of the 19th century with particular impudence, they were not reflected in the official version of our past, just as neither ]]> Great Tartary ]]> nor the Great Northern Route fit into it. ]]> Atlantis ]]> with ]]> the fallen moon ]]> even then they didn’t fit. One-time destruction of 200...400 million hectares of forest it is even easier to imagine, and even to hide, than the unquenchable, 100-year-old fire proposed for consideration by science.
So what is the age-old sadness of Belovezhskaya Pushcha about? Is it not about those severe wounds of the earth that the young forest covers? After all, giant fires don’t happen on their own...
Izhevsk
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The oldest tree in Russia grows in Yakutia
Scientists from the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Forest and Wood named after. V.N. Sukachev discovered an area with the oldest trees growing within our country.
It is known that of the trees growing in the forest zone of Eurasia, the longest-living are larches (genus Larix). Trees of this genus (there are about 25 species) grow in lowland forests of temperate cold and in mountain forests warm temperate zone Northern Hemisphere– in Europe, Asia and North America. Until now, larch was considered to be one of the trees growing in North America - its age is estimated at 728 years.
The age of larches growing in Russia, as studies have shown, increases in the direction from west to east. On Polar Urals and in Western Siberia the oldest living tree discovered was 486 years old, in Central Siberia it was 609 years old, and in northeastern Siberia it was 670 years old. Further research in this region made it possible to find an area where numerous Cajander larch trees grow ( Larix cajanderi
), having an age of more than 800 years! downstream. More than ten of the larches growing here were 750–850 years old, and the record holders were two trees aged 878 and 885 years. However, the share of such old trees on the site is about 15%, and the rest of the forest stand is represented by younger larches.
It is interesting that trees having such advanced age, are by no means gigantic in size. Their height is only 8.5–9 m, and the trunk diameter at human chest level is about 25 cm. This is due to extremely harsh climatic conditions - the average radial growth of trunks in this area is only about 0.15–0.22 mm /year, which corresponds to the annual growth of approximately 5–7 rows of wood cells.
It is natural that weather are not constant, but vary from year to year. Accordingly, the value tree rings growth changes - more warm years they are wider, and in colder weather they are narrower. This gives researchers the opportunity to reconstruct the pattern of wood cuts climatic conditions
previous years. And the presence of tree cuts that are many centuries old allows you to obtain truly unique data! Along with growing living trees, the site discovered by Krasnoyarsk scientists contains a significant number of dry trunks varying degrees
Thus, in Yakutia, scientists actually discovered a natural recorder that recorded changes in air temperature in this region over the past 2000 years! And such data, in turn, allows us to re-evaluate information about the formation of flora and fauna, and about the characteristics of people’s lives at that time. For example, already preliminary study collected material indicates that in the period from 900 to 1300 there was a warming of the climate in the northeast of our country.
Based on materials from an article by E.N. Vaganova, M. Mnaurzbaeva and I.V. Jaegers
“Limit age of larch trees in Siberia” (Forest Science. 1999. No. 6)