As we rolled into each town with notebook pages full of connections to local tree nurseries, planting organizations, land owners and volunteers, I think we even surprised ourselves a little.

It wasn’t an easy process, that’s for sure. We kind of made it up as we went along. That said, something of this scope has to start somewhere, so we started by “calendaring” our “ideal” itinerary and going from there.

Slowly but surely, locations to plant, key interview appointments, and tree pickups or deliveries went down on paper. Even though certain things would fall through and require us to change course a little or switch a few dates around, the process was relatively painless.

So, now that we are about 5 months away from hitting the road again to plant native trees in the 25 remaining states (note: the 25 BIGGER states), we are back to the drawing board again. We’ve got the whiteboard out, the atlas open, and we’re happy to report that the first draft of our planting tour is on the calendar!

Between March and May 2011, our planting tour will stop in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota, Washington, and Alaska. (Phew! Long list!) In addition, we hope to swing into Washington D.C. to participate in the Environmental Film Festival happening there in mid-March.

Ideas have been sprouting as to places/trees we’d like to visit along the way, and we’re open to suggestions as we finish our goal of planting native trees in all 50 states. Feel free to leave comments with your ideas! And of course, when the tour is complete, we will celebrate with a huge tree planting event and festival on our home island of Maui (date TBD – sometime in May 2011).

To support our efforts, click here to visit our online store – proceeds from sales go to support our project! Check out our new Commemorative Tree Planting offers!

The first time I heard the name Methuselah, it was in the Book of Genesis. He was Noah’s grandfather, and was memorable because he supposedly lived to be almost 1,000 years old. He died around the same time as The Great Flood.

Much later in life, as I listened closer to stories about the Earth to do research for the Plant a Wish documentary project, I heard there was a famous tree with the same name. I knew instantly that it must be a really old tree.

A bristlecone pine living outside of Death Valley, California, the “Methuselah tree” is now estimated at being 4,841 years old – the oldest known living specimen on the earth. (To put that into perspective, it germinated around the time when the Great Pyramid was being built.) Its exact location is kept secret to prevent vandalism, and the conditions where it lives are nothing but the ultimate in extreme. Not much else is able to exist there.

“There is something a little fantastic, ” wrote Edmond Schulman in the March 1958 National Geographic, “in the persistent ability of a 4,000 year old tree to shut up shop almost everywhere throughout its stem in a very dry year, and faithfully to reawaken to add many new cells in a favorable year.”

What do we have to learn from dating a Methuselah tree? We learn that the oldest living things on earth are resilient creatures. They can stay alive when nothing else around them lives. They reach their roots and branches around to where life is – making them curve and twist like fine blown glass. The trunks of ancient bristlecone pine like Methuselah are so distorted that new rings may form at right angles to ones formed before (this makes their rings very difficult to count).

They’re not especially tall – and their relatively short stature is one reason scientists think they have such great survival skills – bigger is not better in the brutal environment where they live.

While on tour this summer, we decided to make a special stop at the University of Missouri in Columbia. The Missouri Tree Ring Laboratory is there, and we spent time with Dr. Mike Stambaugh (Researcher at the Lab) to talk about what tree rings can tell us about the environment that existed before written records were kept. We did a nice sit-down interview with him outside the Lab, and then he showed us around inside.

Have a look at Rachel’s “Clip of the Week”, where Dr. Mike shares some tree ring (dendrochronology) specimens with us.

Photo by Cesar Fernandez Photography.

Diagram copyright V. Moerbitz 2006.

It’s been a while since our last blog update, but those of you following us on Facebook and Twitter know that we’ve been sending you real-time posts from the field.

Today is Joe’s birthday, and we are spending the day in our nation’s capital. We’ll be visiting with American Forests’ “Historic Trees” program staff, and will be picking up a Moon Sycamore (a tree grown from seeds that have been to the moon) to plant in the D.C. area.

Just to get you up to speed, since we last wrote on our blog, we’ve traveled to Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, planting native trees in each state! (Click on the state name to see photos and details about each planting. For a full photo gallery that is updated regularly, click here: http://plantawish.org/media-room/photo-gallery/)

Our travels have been eye-opening, inspiring, and incredibly rewarding. Each time we’ve gathered with a community to plant a native tree together, we have been reminded of the beauty of the simple act of planting a tree. And we’ve made so many great friends along the way – our only regret is that we can only spend a day or so in each location. (We’re already planning to hold film screenings in each place once the film is complete.)

This experience is turning out to be much more than we could have ever hoped for. Not only have we learned so much about the powers that trees have to make us safe, healthy, and even happy, but we have seen (and documented in gorgeous 24p video) the incredible community bonding that can occur when folks gather around to plant a tree together. Priceless stuff.

Please follow our project on Facebook, at http://www.facebook.com/plantawish – and please feel free to chime in to let us know what you think!