Designers around the world have created whimsical Christmas trees inspired by lotus flowers, French macarons, and children's story books. Check out this assortment of unusual trees around the world.
A selection of extraordinary Christmas trees throughout the world—most are local traditions, many are breaking records, and one appears to break through a suburban roof.
Sweden's Treehotel has a number of different tree houses to rent by the night and one of the coolest is the Mirror Cube, which disappears into its surroundings. A prefab version of it is now available for sale, complete with installation.
Commissioned by the city of London to replace a dying sycamore tree, the Traffic Light Tree has 75 signals that bewilder birds and confuse motorists—doing everything but directing traffic.
In South Africa's coastal grasslands, to explore a forest is to walk along its canopy—indeed, it's the only way to observe an extraordinary group of so-called underground trees, where only the uppermost leaves and branches are visible. Tucked away and protected from so many environmental threats, they underground forests are considered all but immortal, with estimated ages of 13,000 years or more.
We've all seen neat tree houses, but did you know that there's a tree church? In France, the Chêne Chappelle (Chapel Oak) is 800 years old, houses two tiny chapels in its hollow trunk, and was said to have been visited by William the Conqueror himself.
A desert plant, the Welwitschia mirabilis is beloved among botanists who seek the very old and the very strange. It's a living fossil that survives in the desert, neither a typical succulent or a cactus, and neither a shrub nor a bush. It has been named a dwarf tree, and a director of the Royal Botanic Gardens once described it as "the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country, and the very ugliest."
A series of 19th-century Japanese tree panel paintings, currently on exhibit at London's Natural History Museum, depict each type of tree on a matching wood panel, combining taxonomy and art.
Matt Ritter, the author of A Californian's Guide to the Trees Among Us, and a botany professor, talks about the difference between the cultivated and invasive trees, which trees are taking over California, and why poor neighborhoods seem to have fewer types of trees.
