The oldest organism in the world is 600,000-year-old Siberian bacteria, and the oldest plant is a 200,000-year-old sea grass meadow near Spain. But the Southwest has the distinction of being home to the largest concentration of old plant species.
Many of these are “clonal,” meaning they can reproduce through root shoots that are genetically identical to the parent plant.
The oldest known clonal species in the Southwest is a Quaking Aspen stand found on the edge of the Colorado Plateau in Utah. Named Pando, the stand contains about nearly fifty thousand trees and is estimated to be 14,000 years old...