Tree Weaver

We breathe in what the trees breathe out and vise-versa ..
We all interconnected ..

Repost via Soul Alchemy

Sequoia National Forest, United States
Glory and wonder here on little old earth. This shot is from a particularly magical hike through the Sequoia National Forest. We were so up high in the mountains that the clouds decided to settle around us and create a mystical fog all around us.
Photo by Victoria Palacios

Exercise releases endorphins, improves physical and mental health and helps you sleep better.

Whilst most people might automatically think of the gym as the go-to place to work out, surrounded by dumbells, treadmills and rowing machines, taking things back to basics and exercising outdoors can bring more benefits. Trees, woods and forests help people feel better, encourage more active lifestyles and alleviate the symptoms of debilitating conditions. So, it makes perfect sense to combine your daily exercise with a trip to the great outdoors.

The Benefits of Exercising in Nature

There are countless benefits to working out in the woods. Whether you don your bicycle helmet and go for a bike ride, enjoy a run in the crisp morning air or even try your hand at some woodland yoga, you will soon reap some fantastic rewards:

Improving Mental Health

Scientific studies have shown that ‘green exercise’ can improve self esteem and mood as well as reducing anxiety disorders and depression. It’s not just the physiological effects of exercise, such as the release of endorphins, dopamine and seretoin that cause these responses. By comparing different exercise settings, studies showed that regular use of woods or parks for physical exercise reduced the risk of poor mental health, whereas no such pattern was found in non-natural settings like gyms.

Reducing Stress

Being in or near the natural world has proven to reduce stress and increase well being, whether you’re exercising or not. Simply having views of trees, plants and shrubs at work can increase employee well being, and having the same views from a hospital window can decrease recovery time. So, combining nature and exercise is a great way to alleviate stress.

Increasing Vitamin D

Of course, being outside in the sunshine when working out is a brilliant way to increase your vitamin D. Vitamin D boosts your immune system, help fights depression, promotes bone growth and prevents osteoporosis, so it’s an important vitamin to have. Get outside for your workouts from late March to the end of September for the ultimate vitamin D boost.

Get a Better Workout

Particularly if you’re a cyclist or a runner, opting to head to the woods instead of the gym can give you a much more intensive workout. While you may be able to adjust the incline on a treadmill or add resistance on an exercise bike, nothing can replicate the terrain outdoors. With steep hills and undulating ground, a workout in the woods is always full of variety, and allows you to push yourself harder.

Alleviating Boredom

As convenient as running on a treadmill or doing a workout DVD might be, nothing beats the thrill of exercising outdoors. It’s a great boredom buster too – you can work out while watching wildlife, trying your hand at foraging and exploring the wonders of the woods.

Saving Money

Finally, exercising in the woods is a much cheaper alternative to splashing out on a gym membership. So, if you’re looking to save money and reap the benefits of the great outdoors at the same time, while not venture out into nature for your next workout?

Reference: Hannah Vickers, The Woodland Trust.

Stephen Armstrong {journalist on the Guardian newspaper}, reports that trees undergo many adjustments from sunset to sunrise – even falling asleep during the hours of darkness.

Charles Darwin showed that plants actually grow in spurts late at night, with plant stems elongating fastest in the hours just before dawn. They also drink heavily. Plants absorb water in their roots {a process called transpiration} and then, as water evaporates from the leaves, “it pulls up” other water molecules behind it to fill the space {a phenomenon called cohesion}. In trees, the long slender capillaries that suck up water can fail across the day if too much water evaporates too rapidly – internal columns of water break and fail. At night, trees refill, swelling every leaf and twig.

In 2016, researchers at the Centre for Ecological Research in Thiny, Hungry, pointed laser scanners at two birch trees – one in Austria and one in Finland – to measure any changes to their shape. Between two hours after sunset and just before sunrise, the trees branches drooped – by as much as 10cm {4 inches}.

To rule out effects of weather and location, the experiment was done twice with two different trees. Both tests were done in calm conditions with no wind or condensation.

The drooping effect is caused by water pressure dropping within plant cells. Some plants even wrap their leaves away at night when they’re not needed and pump water back into cells at the base of the leaf to open them in the morning.

So how can branches droop as more water is being pumped in? Zlinszky speculates that the trees may be resting – literally going to sleep, just like humans. Plants don’t have the central nervous system that control what we think of as “sleep” – but they do have circadian rhythms, tuned to Earth’s 24-hour light-dark cycle, even if they’re kept in light full-time.

During the day, branches and leaves are angled higher, straining up to catch as much sunlight as possible. Pumping water into every cell is an energy-intensive business and serves no purpose after the sun goes down. Trees like all plants rely on a mixture of photosynthesis and respiration to survive. Photosynthesis uses light from the sun to power a chemical reaction – between water, carbon dioxide and a handful of minerals – that produce complex organic molecules. Having torn the carbon dioxide apart to grab the raw ingredients to make these molecules, the plant then throws away the rest – the oxygen, which is pumped out of the plants during the day.

As animals, we use oxygen as fuel in burning up our fuel – specifically glucose, which we also get from plants, just one of the reasons they’re so important to us. But glucose is an important source of energy for plants too, and to burn it they also need oxygen. Hence plants respire – or breathe – in a comparable way to us. Respiration doesn’t require light, so when a tree stops photosynthesising it carries on “breathing” throughout the night, taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide.

Of course, for us to be here, trees can’t use as much oxygen as they produce – plants generally produce four times the oxygen they need for respiration. In effect, trees are producing food during the day and consuming it at night. Work by a team from the John Innes Centre in Norwich has discovered that they use a chemical calculator to divide the amount of stored energy by the length of the night, so they don’t starve. This calculator is so adaptable that plants used to 12 hour days can adjust to an 8 hour day, recalculating their metabolic rate to their normal nightly rhythm.

But for some plants, this inefficient combination of photosynthesis and respiration is deadly. “Trees in hot climates need to preserve water, so they don’t want to open their stomata in the midday sun,” explains Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum. To avoid this, they only open these microscopic pores at night – when the plant has to take in enough oxygen and CO2 to last the day; they store this CO2 in a chemical called malic acid, then release it at night.

So next time you are passing through the woods at night and all seems quiet and still, listen a little harder. All around you, trees are relaxing, letting branches hang, eating, stretching and sucking up water.

Reference:

theguardian.com

” Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we’ve cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we’re doing so on a greater scale than ever. We destroy trees at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them ”

~ Sir David Attenborough

Photos from fb page – The Guardian of the Woods

Treesisters: women seeding change

https://youtu.be/c90dYhID_gA

Have you heard about Sing for the Trees. It’s the delicious women’s event that treesisters all over the world are participating in on International Women’s Day – March 8th 2019.

We’re calling in women who love to sing, love to bring people together and love the trees. Does that sound like you?

On March 8th or 9th, treesisters from all over the world will be gathering in their parks, forests and gardens to Sing for the Trees. We’re doing this to raise awareness of the importance of the world’s trees to our survival, and women’s role in the restoration of our forests. We’re honouring our connection to Nature, each other and the trees by calling the women together and singing to, for and with the trees. It will be a beautiful, nourishing and connecting activity to participate in.

If you’d love to coordinate a Sing for the Trees activity in your part of the world, we’d love to have you, even if you’ve only just found TreeSisters. We’ve got songs, a support group for coordinators, a coordinators kit, the help of wonderful singer/songwriter Liz Terry, and tons of encouragement. You can coordinate a public event or a very private event. You can make this yours and sing your own songs, or you can use the materials we’re offering. Whatever feels nourishing and easeful for you.

All the information you need is in our Sing for the Trees group in the Nest (our new online treesisters community platform) which you can join here: http://bit.ly/SingfortheTreesIWD19 – See you very soon!

We’d love to call in women from across our beautiful planet, so please help them see this post by leaving a comment or sharing emoji or asking any questions you may have below! Thank you! For The Trees 🌳

Owl photo by Michael Marchand, the young boar taken from the britishwildboar.org, the common buzzard by a-z animals.com, the buzzard by the BBC2 Springwatch, the hedgehog by Daniel Allen, the other photos from The Woodland Trust