It’s a fine Western experience to wander through a shimmering aspen grove on a sunny fall day. But one particular grove is especially stunning.
A single stand of aspen on a hillside above Fish Lake in south-central Utah is billed as the largest living organism on the planet. It’s called Pando, Latin for “I spread.”
Pando covers about 105 acres and contains more than 45,000 individual aspen stems. Aspen spread by an underground root system, and DNA testing has shown that every tree in the Pando clone is genetically identical--all arose from one parent, possibly thousands of years ago...