Last Friday, I was a guest on the radio show Science Friday with photographer Rachel Sussman. We talked about her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, for which I wrote the introduction. You can listen here. (And you can read my whole introduction to Sussman’s book here.)

I talked on the show about some of the ideas that scientists are exploring about why some species live for a long time and some don’t. What’s intriguing me a lot right now is how old some plants can get. There are a few animal species can reach a very ripe age, such as clams that live for five hundred years. But Sussman’s book is dominated by plants–by