Which is the biggest plant in the world?
The quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides, may not look like much above the ground: belowground, though, an entire grove of the trees is a single organism. Their roots are connected, with new shoots sprouting from the root system. An aspen grove in Utah, nicknamed “Pando”, covers 43 hectares and has about 47,000 stems. Yes, it’s a single plant: think of it as a double-trunked tree writ very, very large. If you mean the biggest non-clonal currently-living individual plant (one that looks like a single individual), that’s the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) nicknamed “General Sherman”. At 83.8 m high and a volume of 1487 cubic meters, it’s the largest non-clonal tree by volume. If you mean the *species* whose trunks grow *tallest*, measured by averages, that’d be Eucalyptus regnans. It’s an Australian gum tree that grows to 230-330 feet high. One called “Centurion” is 99.6 m tall; one felled in 1880 topped out at 114.3 m. (They’re not so big around as “General Sherman”, so their volume
