Since nobody can track how many twigs, cowpats and rice husks a billion peasants burn or alternatively, leave to fungi to convert into methane, a powerful greenhouse gas China's carbon accountants can make its renewable numbers come out anywhere they like.
While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests.
Too many twigs, or the bark is peeling off in a weird way.
"The idea is to show how much work a large nest is," said Ms. Williams, who plans another contest: to guess how many twigs a real one requires.
Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few now have living and modified descendants.
A visit noted the following debris: two Band-Aids (one a Spider-Man), a plastic cup from Elixir Juice, a sheet of aluminum foil, a crushed water bottle (later stricken from the list after being reclassified as a toy by a small child), many leaves and twigs, and an object that could not be identified but which prompted a cry of "Nicky, no! Don't put that in your mouth!" from a nearby bench.
At a distance, the tree appeared organic, whole and beautifully clad in ochre lichen; close up, its 99 pieces – cast from the branches, twigs and trunks of many trees gathered by many people across China – became discernible as one complex but united body.
Typical symptoms are a slow decline, yellowing and dying of leaves, and dieback of twigs and branches in many groves 15 years or older.
There are many possibilities, including making wreaths from twigs and leaves, nut sculptures, leaf prints, photos of landscapes turned into artworks, seed pictures, seed pod figurines, and much more.
