Word: tree
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crisp evening last week, Amy Carter stepped up to a podium on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, and pressed the button controlling the lights on a 30-ft. blue spruce and 50 smaller trees around it, one for each state. But for the first time since Calvin Coolidge began the tradition in 1923, the big tree did not burst into light. Only the white star on its top and the tiny blue bulbs on the smaller trees blinked on. "Amy has lit 50 trees-one for each American hostage," explained President Carter to the 7,500 surprised...
With a tall, slender trunk and a ragged umbrella of drooping green leaves, it looks like a mimosa. But the tropical Leucaena leucocephala is a bit different from other trees: in tropical climates it grows as high as 65 ft. in five years. That makes it a prime candidate for reforestation projects in overlumbered and wood-short Third World countries. The tree is also sort of a botanical schmoo;* undemanding itself, it provides a bountiful array of foods and fuels...
That is the word being spread by Forestry Expert Michael Benge, an employee of the federal Agency for International Development, who has become a bureaucratic Johnny Appleseed for the leucaena. Benge reports that in some tropical lands, leaves from the tree are eaten like candy by children and, dipped in a pepper sauce, as a tasty hors d'oeuvre by adults. Its seed pods are chewed or stewed or painted as tourist trinkets; the seeds can be ground as a surrogate for flour or coffee. Better yet, the leaves can be used for protein-rich cattle feed, and nitrogen...
...secret of the leucaena's rapid growth is in its roots; they extend as deep as the tree is tall. That enables it to soak up nutrients below the reach of other plants. Growing on the leucaena roots are fungi called mycorrhizae that help by absorbing phosphorus compounds that cannot be used by most plants, and converting them into forms that can nourish the tree. Then too the steady dropping of leaves provides rich nutrition for other plants...
...might answer. "Oh, in the house," Romain would reply slowly. Single words were expanded to phrases, phrases to sentences. Romain and Koeneke never directly corrected the twins. The girls seemed astonishingly innocent of the simplest childhood pleasures. They were totally baffled by a picture of a boy climbing a tree. The pathologists remember they provoked "exciting" language by taking the two outside to demonstrate tree climbing. After more than 100 hours of play were videotaped, Romain and Koeneke learned the girls' private language. But when the speech pathologists used it, Ginny and Gracie refused to answer. "They...