The Carnivorous Habits of Christmas Trees By RON SULLIVAN Special to the Planet

We don’t have a lot of eastern white pines (Pinus strobus) in Berkeley. There are lots of domestic cultivars—weeping, or tall and narrow, or bluer than the usual—and if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the species Mom and Dad used to get for the Christmas tree when I was a kid in Pennsylvania. That was partly a matter of tradition, I guess, but also because its soft needles weren’t hazardous when we were all hanging ornaments and tinsel.
And with mycorrhizae, the literal connection of huge communities, we discover the functioning of whole forests as a single superorganism. That part’s not quite news: people have been selling and buying and surreptitiously moving mycorrhizae into their gardens and bonsai pots for years. People have also realized that disturbing or destroying this web is one of the things that trigger invasions by weeds, exotic plants like star thistle and pampas grass, plants out of place that push out natives and make sites effectively useless for the local animals and plants that depend on the original plant community. Plants not interwoven with the web can then “outcompete” the plants that were part of the original, now ruptured, living polity. The originals have effectively had part of themselves amputated.

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