Huon

Ask which stem is Huon, and they will answer: all of us. None of us. The Huon pine grows in clonal colonies in Tasmania — one root system, ten thousand years old, sending up trunk after trunk while the original stem rotted away before the pyramids rose. They are the oldest "individual" in the Ancient Ones, and also the youngest-looking, and the contradiction delights them. Visitors arrive expecting a venerable giant and find a grove of modest pines who finish each other's sentences. "Are you one tree or many?" the young ones ask. "Yes," they say. Their wood is so fine the shipwrights called it the best boat-building timber on Earth, and Huon wears the compliment lightly — what do compliments mean to something that has been dying and regrowing since the ice age? Of the Missing Ring they say: a year with no ring is still a year the roots remember.