"I think that I shall never see," wrote Joyce Kilmer, "a poem as lovely as a tree." Trees are lovely and, like people, they come in so many varieties. Some, like the giant sequoias in California, are large enough to drive a car through. Others, like the slender, ungainly dogwood, remind us of the cross of Christ. Easterners see a palm tree and they think of Florida or the coastal areas of the Carolinas or Georgia. In the springtime tourists flock to Washington, D. C. to enjoy trees filled with cherry blossoms.

The world is filled with an amazing variety of trees. In the deserts of Namibia there are trees still alive from the time of Christ, yet their central trunk has never grown more than three feet in height. Instead they produce two huge leaves up to twenty feet in length which never f…