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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
On a hike recently in the Montgomery Woods State Reserve, near Ukiah, California, I wandered among the area's massive coast redwoods with my friend Al Richmond. We were looking for the Mendocino Tree, which, although it rises 367 feet above the forest floor, can still be hard to pick out from the ground. The surrounding trees are nearly that tall.
As we stood dwarfed by the grove of towering trees, I pondered a biomechanical question that might occur to anyone who comes face to face with a life-form as majestic as the Mendocino Tree: how do trees grow so tall, and what, if anything, keeps them from growing even taller? The leading hypothesis has been that trees are limited only by their ability to get water from the ground to their highest leaves. To get to the bottom of the mystery, a group of plant physiologists went to the top: they scaled the redwoods in a grove a few miles to our north.
Water does not ordinarily run uphill. And, as Aristotle knew, it's impossible to pull water higher than about thirty feet by suction. Trees, however, can lift water well...
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