After a forest fire Mother Nature repairs the damage with quick growing plants......first the forbs (little leafy things) and then shrubs and trees. These first trees are fast growing as they have a job to do, but sacrifice long lift to grow so fast. As a result they also die out quickly but not until the slower growing and longer lived plants have a start under the protective canopy of the nurse plants.

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After a forest fire Mother Nature repairs the damage with quick growing plants......first the forbs (little leafy things) and then shrubs and trees. These first trees are fast growing as they have a job to do, but sacrifice long lift to grow so fast. As a result they also die out quickly but not until the slower growing and longer lived plants have a start under the protective canopy of the nurse plants.

The die out quickly because they lack the ability to ward off disease. I'll explain below. Longer lived trees have the ability to contain disease. Let's leave it at that. This isn't an epistle.

In woody plants.......trees........a plant is under constant assault from fires, insects......and Boy Scouts with hatchets. Each wound in a tree is compartmentalized.......not healed.....but rather isolated by chemical barrier walls within the plant to contain disease development or spread. New wood grows over the wound and we say "healed" but the wound is always there. This comparmentalization takes energy to maintain 24/7/365. The more wounds, the more compartments, the more energy drain on the plant.

Sorry to say, yes, they do! Root rot usually gets them (Hey! Maybe that's what I've got). When they get to the point where their bark is worse than their blight, they go off to the big forest in the sky!

One may speak of trees having life spans, in the sense of having an average life expectancy.
Trees endure as long as they do basically because they're nonhierarchical organisms. In animals, all vital functions are controlled by the central nervous system, the guiding element of which is the brain. When the brain dies, so does the animal. By contrast, vital functions in trees are decentralized. A large part of the tree can die, and indeed routinely does die, witho...

One may speak of trees having life spans, in the sense of having an average life expectancy.
Trees endure as long as they do basically because they're nonhierarchical organisms. In animals, all vital functions are controlled by the central nervous system, the guiding element of which is the brain. When the brain dies, so does the animal. By contrast, vital functions in trees are decentralized. A large part of the tree can die, and indeed routinely does die, without killing off the tree as a whole.
Of course there are some very old trees about. There is a bristlecone pine somewhere in the White Mountains of California named Methuselah which is 4,723 years old. (There was an even older one called Prometheus which turned out to 4,950 years old, but the U.S. Forest Service allowed that one to be felled in 1964.) The Japanese claim to have an ever older tree, a cedar on Yakushima Island called Jomon-Sugi which is supposed to be between 6,300 or 7,200 years old.
http://everything2.com/node/14...

Yes they do. I heard that humans have the exact same DNA as a tree, but i's just arranged differently. It would be great if someone could discover the longevity gene of the tree and see if it could be duplicated in humans?