By O’S News Service January 14, 2015 Get thee to the library and reserve “The Oldest Living Plants in the World” by photographer Rachel Sussman (just published by University of Chicago Press). This is from the NY Times review by Dana Jennings:
… In her first book, “The Oldest Living Things in the World,” Ms. Sussman stalks and photographs organisms that are at least 2,000 years old. The artist, who lives in Brooklyn, calls the work “an existential journey into deep time” that whisked her from a “temporal comfort zone.” For nearly 10 years, Ms. Sussman worked with biologists to photograph subjects on all seven continents. “I’ve photographed 30 different species,” she writes, “ranging from lichens in Greenland that grow only one centimeter every hundred years, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, brain coral in the Caribbean and an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah.”
Ms. Sussman gives the reader multiple and striking pictures of her prey, but also provides ages, locations, nicknames, common names and Latin names, all complemented by useful mini-essays
Some of her amazing photos follow…
The incredibly cute Llareta plant (Chile, up to 3,000 years old)
Clonal quaking aspens, 80,000 years old, Fish Lake, Utah. I think they grow from rhizomes… All those years ago, when animals diverged from plants, it was the plants who were superior, in a sense. The animals had to scramble for food and water and a livable environment. The plants could take it easy.
