Four Green Log Cabins

 

Because we have a three mature oak trees in the back garden, we also have at least one squirrel there. (Possibly more, but we only see one at a time.) This squirrel feverishly stocked acorns EVERYWHERE last autumn, and the ones he didn’t eat last winter sprouted up all over the place this spring. I was reading the other day about a group of Russian scientists who found a series of ancient arctic squirrel burrows near the Kolyma River in 2012. In the rodents’ storage chambers, they found over 600,000 specimens of seeds and fruits estimated to be over 30,000 years old. Among them were narrow-leafed campion seeds (Silene stenophylla). At first, efforts to germinate the seeds proved unsuccessful. But when the Russian Academy of Sciences added tissue samples from the campion fruit into the mix, they were able to propagate 32 “new” plants from the 30,000-year-old seeds – by far the oldest plants ever grown.