My name is quaking aspen.  I am a 50-foot-tall tree with nearly round leaves.  The slightest breeze makes my leaves quake and tremble, so the scientific name that botanists gave me is populus tremuloides.

Isn't that a pretty name?

And I'm a pretty tree.  My bark is smooth, and nearly white, with numerous black markings.  My leaves turn brilliant yellow in the fall, which makes a grove of quaking aspens a strikingly beautiful thing that's worth making a long drive to see.

My real claim to fame is that, other than some form of fungus that lives underground, I am the largest living thing on earth.  My roots spread out in all directions, and can send up new shoots a hundred feet from my main trunk.  The trees that those shoots form also send up new shoots, so a grove of aspens is really one organism.  The grove might have hundreds or thousands of individual tree trunks, but they are all connected to a common root system.

A grove of quaking aspens in Utah occupies 108 acres, and is all one organism--the largest organism in the world.  It is estimated to weigh 6,600 tons.  That dwarfs a 6-1/2 ton African elephant, or a 30-ton brontosaurus, or the largest-ever blue whale that was nearly 210 tons.  That was a female whale taken in the waters of Antarctica.  She weighed as much as 32 elephants.

The root system of that quaking aspen grove in Utah is estimated to be several thousand years old, making it one of the oldest known living things.  The grove has over 40,000 trunks, all genetically identical.  The U.S. postal system issued a stamp featuring this grove of cloned aspen trees, calling it one of forty "Wonders of America."

If you plant a quaking aspen in your yard, you can expect to have hundreds of new shoots come up.  That's no problem if you keep your lawn mowed, but your neighbor might not appreciate having to cut quaking aspen shoots out of his flower beds.

I've always wondered about the fairy tale legend of Sleeping Beauty whose whole household went to sleep when she pricked her finger on a spinning wheel.  Her castle disappeared in a tangle of vegetation.  Do you suppose it was because her gardener didn't keep the quaking aspen shoots mowed that her specimen tree sent up?  Someone ought to check out the center of that grove in Utah, and see what's there.  They might find a sleepy princess in a hidden castle.