"Death is only the beginning"... zombie trees !
Curious about how it was surviving without green foliage, they decided to put several continuous water monitors in the kauri (Agathis australis) stump and in two nearby adult trees of the same species.Over the following weeks, they found a relationship between the water flow in the trees and the stump. This meant that when the neighbouring trees would evaporate water through their leaves during the day, the water movement in the stump remained low. But when the trees were dormant during the evening, the water would begin circulating through the stump.Similarly, when it became overcast or rainy and the water flow dropped in the trees, it picked up in the stump. In healthy trees, water flow is largely driven by evaporation, but without leaves the stump’s water flow was bound by the movements of its neighbours.
The stumps of felled trees can
sometimes grow back into new trees. I wonder if this is possible for these preserved stumps to recover and eventually grow new leaves and become self-supporting ?
A tree stump that should have died is being kept alive by neighbouring trees that are funnelling water and nutrients to it through an interconnected root system. The finding adds to a growing understanding that trees and other organisms can work together for the benefit of a forest.
One of our two lemon trees fully came back from the dead starting about two or three years after it got whacked, I think. (This was a quarter-century ago, so I might be wrong about the timing, but it was chopped nearly to the ground.) It's as tall as its neighbor right now, which is less than 2m away. Maybe the same thing? Or is the whole "should be dead" bit naive to start with?
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