If you've read Sarah and Alexander you know about the significance of upstate NY and The Tree. The articles below are laced with metaphors linked to my book. It's about a town in the Catskill Mountains where they found the stump of a tree that represent the earliest known forest. The town is Gilboa (gill, fish and boa, snake, Gilgamesh). "The name "Gilboa" is from a location in Israel." Earth's oldest known tree stood nearly 30 (3) feet tall and looked like a modern palm, a new reconstruction shows. The upright stumps of the fossilized trees were uncovered after a flash flood (flood stories) more than a century ago. However, until now, no-one has known what the entire trees looked like.

World's First Tree Reconstructed Live Science - April 18, 2007

In 2004, scientists unearthed a 400-pound fossilized top or crown of the same genus a few miles away. The following summer, the same team discovered fragments of a 28-foot trunk. Piecing together stump, trunk and crown now reveals what the full tree looked like for the first time.

Reconstruction line drawing of Wattieza.

Earth's oldest known tree stood nearly 30 feet tall and looked like a modern palm, a new reconstruction shows. Workers uncovered hundreds of upright stumps of the 385 million-year-old tree more than a century ago, after a flash flood in Gilboa, New York uncovered them, but little else was known about the tree's appearance. Then, in 2004, scientists unearthed a 400-pound fossilized top - or crown - of the same genus a few miles away. The following summer, the same team discovered fragments of a 28-foot trunk. Piecing together stump, trunk and crown now reveals what the full tree looked like for the first time. The tree belonged to a group of early fern-like plants called Wattieza. Unlike flowering plants, which use seeds to reproduce, Wattieza used spores, the reproductive method of choice for algae, ferns and fungi.