Helio da Silva, a retired business executive from Brazil, single-handedly planted over 41,000 trees in his hometown of Sao Paolo over the last two decades.

Flying over the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paolo, it’s tough to miss the 3.2-kilometers-long and 100-meter-wide green strip of trees wedged between two of the city’s busiest roads. It is known as Tiquatira Linear Park, and it is the work of a single man who worked tirelessly for over 20 years in order to transform a previously dilapidated area into an actual jungle within the urban jungle that is Sao Paolo. Originally from the town of Promissao, about 500km from Sao Paulo, Helio da Silva was a successful business executive for many years, but after retiring, he took it upon himself to transform the degraded banks of the Tiquatira River into a green oasis for his community. He started planting trees there in 20023 and hasn’t stopped since.

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A bizarre-looking fir tree sliced in half during a neighborly dispute over bird droppings has become a popular tourist attraction with its own Google reviews in the Waterthorpe suburb of Sheffield, England.

Three years ago, the now-famous half-cut fir tree of Waterhope made international news headlines for the first time. Located on the edge of Bharat Mistry’s property, it extended its evergreen crown on the driveway of Irene and Graham Lee. The birds nesting in the 25-year-old fir tree had become a nuisance to the Lee’s as they constantly had to clean their driveway of droppings. At first, the two parties involved tried to find an amicable solution, like trimming the branches or installing nets to prevent birds from nesting in it, but since no compromise was reached, the Lees took matters into their own hands and hired an arborist to cut the tree in half and remove its branches from their property. Photos of the odd-looking tree quickly went viral and the tree became a local tourist attraction.

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Pterocarpus angolensis, commonly known as wild teak or bloodwood, is a species of tree native to Southern Africa known primarily for the dark red sap it secretes which looks like blood when the tree is cut.

Well-known in tropical Africa, where it is used to make high-quality furniture and musical instruments, wild teak is resistant to termites and has a nice, spicy fragrance. It is also resistant to fire so trees are sometimes planted around structures that need to be protected from flames. But outside of southern Africa, bloodwood is most known for its unique dark red sap. Its resemblance to blood has made some people speculate about the tree’s magical healing powers in blood illnesses, none of which have been proven by conventional medicine.

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A Shanghai woman has become famous in her home country for promoting the physical and psychological benefits of hugging trees.

Qishishiqi hugged her first tree back in April, while out on the tow with her husband. Feeling a little tipsy, the woman hugged a random tree on an empty street in Shanghai and immediately felt positive effects. A constant ringing in the ears that she claimed was caused by work-related stress ‘magically disappear’ while hugging the thick tree trunk, and this ‘superb’ first experience motivated her to not only look for other trees to hug but also share her story with others so that they may also benefit from it.

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Authorities in Gresham, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, are trying to catch the infamous “Gresham Lumberjack”, a person who is suspected to have cut down around 700 trees in the area for no apparent reason.

A special task force put together by Gresham Police and the Parks & Recreations has been scouring thousands of photos of a forest in Gresham, looking for clues that could help them identify and finally catch the Gresham Lumberjack. The elusive ‘tree serial killer’ has been felling trees for over a year now, and seems to be getting bolder. Unfortunately, so far, all they know is that the culprit seems to prefer trees along a segment of the trail between the Seventh Street Bridge and Towle Avenue, and cutting them with a hand saw or a bow saw.

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Thailand’s “loneliest tree”, a solitary tree growing on a rocky islet only a few meters in diameter, is being seriously threatened by hoards of tourists desperate to get a selfie with it.

The small patch of land located just off the country’s eastern coast, in Trat Province, has been dubbed ‘Koh Khai Hua Roh’ because it looks similar to the island featured in drawings of funny scenes involving a man and a woman trapped on an island in the popular Khai Hua Roh (Selling Laughter) comic. The uninhabited islet is quite a sight to behold, as it is home to a solitary taban tree (Xylocarpus rumphii) that clings to life despite being surrounded by salt water. Unfortunately, the tree’s popularity might just be the death of it…

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Araucaria columnaris, also known as the coral reef araucaria, Cook pine or New Caledonia pine, is a species of conifer native to New Caledonia that tends to tilt sideways when planted outside its natural habitat.

First classified by Johann Reinhold Forster, a botanist accompanying Captain James Cook on his second voyage to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible, the araucaria columnaris soon became popular all around the world, thanks to its distinctive narrowly conical shape and its height (up to 60 meters). Nowadays, these evergreen giants are planted as ornamental trees in various areas with warm and temperate climate on five continents, and they generally don’t attract too much attention, but in some cases they have one noticeable particularity – they lean heavily to one side, and when there are more of them planted in the same area, they all lean in the same direction…

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A cedar forest in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture is home to a couple of unusual crop circle-like patterns that are clearly not random in nature.

Photos of the bizarre patterns, which are visible only from above, made their way on the internet about three years ago and fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories that involved everything from aliens to secret government experiments. Well, that second one turned out to be quite close to the truth, only the experiments weren’t secret, and they weren’t conducted by some obscure outfit, but by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Back in 1973 an area of land near Nichinan City was designated as “experimental forestry” and the results of that experiment are visible today.

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A retired elderly couple has been fighting the desertification of their home in North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region for the last 19 years by planting hundreds of hectares of drought-resistant plants.

Seventy-year-old Tububatu and his wife Taoshengchagan live in a village on the edge of Badain Jaran, China’s third-largest desert, and they’ve been spending every day since their retirement (in 2002) fighting the advancement of the desert with the help of plant-life. Others had tried fighting the desert and failed, but Tububatu just wanted to know if he could make a difference. He started out by planting just 50 trees, but kept doubling his efforts to the point where he now plants thousands of saplings a year. His small desert oasis now spans over 266 hectares and numbers tens of thousands of drought-resistant trees.

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People Driving along Oregon Route 18 in the autumn months or early December are treated to a unique view that is sure to brighten their day – a giant smiley face looking back at them from forest-covered hillside.

Located at roughly mile 25 on Oregon Route 18, between Willamina and Grand Ronde, the now famous smiley face of Oregon makes its appearance every fall, as the color of the trees that make up its body start to change color. It is about 300 feet in diameter, and consists of two different types of conifers, one that changes color in autumn, and one that remains all year round. It has become a popular landmark in Oregon’s rural Polk County, and should continue to put smiles on people’s faces for the next 30-50 years, until the trees are ready to be harvested.

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An Indian man who started planting trees in a barren, sand-filled field 15 years ago is now being praised for transforming the wasteland into a 10,000-tree orchard.

Satyendra Gautam Manjhi, a simple man from the small village of Imaliyachak, in the Indian state of Bihar, claims he was inspired to start planting trees after being visited by Dashrath Manjhi, known as “the man who moved a mountain“. The story of how he spent over 20 years chiseling away at a mountain to make a road to his village has inspired a generation, including the protagonist of this story. Satyendrav says that Dashrath himself told him to start planting an orchard, and that’s exactly what he did.

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Daisugi is a centuries-old forestry technique developed in Japan as a way of cultivating the highly-prized Kitayama Cedar without actually using any land. Today, the visually-striking technique can be witnessed in ornamental gardens.

Dating back to the 14th century, daisugi allowed for the cultivation of Kitayama cedar, a species of tree known for growing exceptionally straight and lacking knots, in a time when high demand and lack of straight land for planting enough trees made growing Kitayama cedars impossible. Similar to the famous art of bonsai, daisugi basically involved heavily pruning a so-called “mother cedar tree” so that only the straightest shoots are allowed to grow. Careful hand-pruning is conducted every couple years, leaving only the top boughs and ensuring that the shoots remain knot free. After about 20 years, the now massive shoots can either be harvested as exceptional Kitayama lumber, or replanted to repopulate forests.

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The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in the UK, are home to thousands of fascinating plants, but none as lonely as the Encephalartos woodii, an ancient cycad species and, most likely, the last one of its kind.

It was in 1895 that botanist John Medley Wood noticed this interesting-looking palm tree on a steep slope in Zululand, southern Africa. Intrigued by its multiple trunks and arched palm fronds, Dr. Wood — who made his living collecting rare plants – had some stems removed and sent to London in a box.It ended up in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, where it has been waiting for a mate for over a century. Despite numerous efforts to find it a mate, the Encephalartos woodii at Kew remains alone, unable to produce an offspring and propagate its species. For this reason, many consider it the world’s loneliest plant.

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Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the founder and first leader of the Soviet Union, lives on in the hearts and minds of the Russian people, but also in one little-known geoglyph in the country’s Siberia region – pine tree forest that spells “Lenin” in Cyrillic letters.

Russian photographer Slava Stepanov was planning a business trip to the city of Omsk, when he remembered a fascinating Google Earth satellite image captured in that region a few years earlier. Taking a day off from work, Stepanov decided to drive to the town of Tyukalinsk and look for a very common-looking grove on the outskirts of the settlement. Planted in straight rows, typical for man-made forests, the pine grove only revealed its secret when Stepanov released his drone to get a view from high above.

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The county of Staffordshire, in central UK, is home to a mysterious and rather eerie attraction – an old oak tree with branches shackled in heavy metal chains tied to a creepy local legend.

The story of the Chained Oak near the village of Alton is the most famous legend in Staffordshire. It is said that one day during the 1830’s, as the Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to his home at Alton Towers estate a beggar woman stopped his carriage in the middle of the road and asked him if he could spare a coin or two. The earl cruelly dismissed her and urged the driver to move on, at which point the woman allegedly cursed him to lose a member of his family whenever a branch fell off a magnificent oak on the side of the road.

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