Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer)

(PBS SoCal) Sept. 12, 2012: Everywhere we turn in California, there's something to eat -- if we know what to look for. Wild foragers and chefs Pascal Baudar and Mia Wasilevich of Transitional Gastronomy shop at the grocery store, but they also head out into the woods regularly, carrying backpacks and knives and compasses, finding edible plants scattered across public lands. They like it so much they've turned it into a business, with Pascal leading interested food nerds out into the woods to collect wild plants like mugwort, elderberries, lambs' quarter, cattails, purslane (verdolagas), wild radishes. and more, while Mia cooks up a feast using these wild ingredients.

(The Premier Discovery) Oct. 30, 2024: Top 20 Biggest Trees in the World. Trees have long stood as silent witnesses to the passage of time, some for thousands of years, growing to sizes that seem impossible. How big can a tree get? From trees so big they can’t be cut down to behemoths that survive fires because of how thick they are. The scale of some trees defies imagination. Here are trees from around the world that are bigger than our imagination can hold.

Trees are conscious. I just know it.

Long ago (26 centuries) a tree in a sense saved the world, not just this planet but this region of space and the many beings transiting through it, most of them devas ("shining ones") of different sorts.

Then Sujata saved the Bodhisattva with food.

That tree, let's call him Bo though who knows that it was male or female, both or neither, was born on the same day the Bodhisattva (future Buddha) came into the world from another world named Tusita. On that same day his future wife was born. Things were coming together for a miraculous realization. He must have been drawn to that fig-producing tree, now called the "sacred pipal" (Ficus religiosa). What shelter it offered him, what dryads (tree spirits) inhabited it, what terrestrial energies it brought up from Bhumi (Terra, Gaia, Earth) or down from the heavens (sagga), who can say?

Dryads are spirits in trees.

(Maybe the Buddha mentioned it, but we are not aware). It gave the Bodhisattva shelter, a center, energy (plenty of tiny figs with lots of calories free on the ground, a gift from the tree, to enjoy, which an Egyptian mummy in a pyramid in a dream told Edgar Cayce were "spiritual food" and which American researchers noted was chemically similar to LSD).

Though purists in the tradition say the Bodhisattva, living on his own in the forest by his own rules or those generally adhered to by independent wandering ascetics, was fasting all that time, and no one seems to know how long from the time the Bodhisattva left the lifesaving donor Sujata and her maid, who nursed him back to health from his previous extreme fasting.

With Bodhi trees everywhere in the world now, most of them directly related to that very tree, Bo, the oldest documented tree in the world, now living on the Buddhist and Hindu island of Sri Lanka, most Buddhists never seem to think to eat the fruit. It falls to the ground and is squashed underfoot during sacred circumambulations or disregarded. Asking Theravada Buddhist monks about it, they laughed off the question. A little research revealed that in India the sacred fig is regarded as a famine food so is not usually eaten, probably due to its small size. But what an idea -- Buddhist Fig Newtons with gluten free crust. They're delicious and easy to collect, more easily with a net to catch them as they fall before the ants find them.

India is amazing for its trees. At least three should be sacred to Buddhists, more sacred than all tree already are. They are the sacred fig, the sal tree (which helped the Buddha a great deal, first sheltering him until Sujata found him and gave him her dana or charity and the twin sals the Buddha chose for his final nirvana), and sandalwood which provides incense around the world and is nearly being brought to extinction because of its healing scent.

Everywhere in India there is a healing tree, the "village pharmacy" known as the neem tree (as valuable a medicine as the moringa or drumstick tree is nutritious). But even more valuable might be the incredible coconut tree, a source of food, fiber, fuel, oil, sugar, pure water, so valuable that in ancient times to cut one down was considered tantamount to killing a person.

Pongamia in Oahu, Hawaii, USA

Now amid all of this tree wealth comes another tree with incredible potential to replace petroleum. This ancient tree from the pea family is known as the pongamia tree (Millettia pinnata).

This tree is incredible for its potential as a biofuel, being 30% oil (in the bean it produces), and nutrient dense due to its high protein content (65% to 70% high quality protein). It is a plant-based oil and a food, a plant that restores oxygen to the environment as well as providing sustenance to bees, the soil, microorganisms like the mycorrhizae (fungi, mycelia) in the ground, and all the other benefit trees provide this world.