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Trees are a resource in continuous evolution: they have the ability to feed themselves and regenerate themselves with the sole help of light and water. The wood they produce has always been man's best ally and has contributed to our survival since the Stone Age. When it is masterfully worked by man, it can produce very different but always useful elements, such as paper, energy, some fabrics, some medicines and clearly many pieces of furniture that surround us.
intOndo has therefore decided to take a small trip into the magical world of trees to look at our furniture, our forests and even our Christmas with different eyes.
With the help of Finnish scholar Olavi Huikavi, for example, we discover that we share 50% of our DNA with trees. Think about it the next time you sit on a wooden chair or walk barefoot on your parquet: that feeling of warmth and tranquility given by the natural tones of the wood, has a very deep reason. Wood is also the material of choice for children and we should always take this into account when choosing our children's room furniture or their toys.
But trees are much more evolved than we are and have learned to work miracles. Their most sophisticated skill is photosynthesis, the biochemical process that allows them to use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars.
All living beings depend on the first element and the second is the basis of the food chain. Plants, of which trees are the largest specimens, capture the energy of the sun and transform it into products such as glucose, which is transmitted to animals and living creatures that feed on it.
The leaves are the organs that capture the colors of light and in most cases the photosynthesis takes place right here. When the tree uses all the blue and red light of the sun its leaves are green; when instead it lacks water, in summer or early autumn, the red light is reflected and the green colour of the leaves decomposes, these two colours together originate the yellow, brown and orange tones typical of autumn leaves. The cold of the winter nights, then, prevents the sap to circulate in the veins of the leaves and so the tree calls to itself all the sugars from the leaf making it become purplish in tone. The tree then drops it knowing that nothing is wasted: the leaf decomposing offers new mineral nourishment for the tree that is able to create a new leaf in spring.
So, the life of trees is a miraculous one that flows in tune with the times; why not take it as an example for our Christmas shopping by giving second-hand or reused objects, perhaps in wood?
