The Perfect Tree

by Graeme Wood

Moringa oleifera, a tree in northwest India, will feed you and clean your water, and it won't die in a drought.  A scientist at a Canadian NGO is urging the wretched of the earth to plant it and solve several problems at once.

I wonder, idly, what other plants have properties that will allegedly save the world.  (I realize this is an exaggeration of the powers claimed for the moringa.) Readers of this blog will no doubt know about the magical properties of hemp.  To these I might add the American sycamore and water hyacinth, which all-purpose genius Freeman Dyson suggested as plants that we might use to remove carbon from the atmosphere rapidly and arrest climate change. 

(Via Greenbang. Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, from Wikipedia, whose full gallery can be found here.)