A few years ago, the New Yorker ran an article by the science writer Richard Preston in which he described the ongoing hunt for the largest trees in the world, redwoods which live in the rain forests of Northern California and which host bizarre ecosystems that have no link back to the ground, 300 feet below. The giant trees are so big, so tall, and so life-sustaining that whole other trees can live in the redwoods' crowns.
I blogged about the piece then, but couldn't link to it because the NYer didn't have the article online. But I just came across a companion article, running in the superb nature magazine Orion, in which Preston describes how two naturalists discovered what is probably the largest organism on the planet, a massive redwood they named the Lost Monarch. The tree is not only a giant in every sense; it grows in a "Grove of Titans" alongside a half-dozen other trees almost as big. The article's an excerpt from Preston's new book, The Wild Trees, which looks to be a fantastic look at one of the last remaining zones of discovery and at least implicitly a strong argument for conservation and natural beauty.