Pando Calrissian

How the tree grows

• Every watering sends up one sucker from the root. Each one grows over the waterings that come after it, and when a stem is old it falls and others come up around it, which is what the real one does. The root keeps spreading along the hill. There is no size it is growing towards and nothing happens at any number: it is never finished, because there is nothing to finish.
• Anybody can look at it, and only people signed on to the CB can water it. The password is shared in our community, which is what keeps the can in the community’s hands.
• The ground soaks for a minute after every watering, from anybody, before it will take more. If you arrive while it is still wet the tree says how long it has left. It is the whole tree’s wait and not yours, so nobody is timed.
• It counts the water and never who poured it. Watering sends your CB pass, so the tree knows somebody signed on is holding the can, and the pass is checked and forgotten. What the tree keeps is the number and the time of the last watering, and nothing else. Nobody has a total, there is no leaderboard and no streak, and nothing here can tell anybody who has been looking after it. If you want your name near the tree, leave a note on the fence.
• The number never goes back to zero. It is the one count on the street, and it belongs to the tree: nobody on the street is counted, and this is how many times we have watered something together. It is kept with no backup, so if it were ever lost it would be lost, and we would plant another.
• Nothing in the grove moves, at any setting. Aspen leaves tremble in the slightest air, which is why they are called quaking aspen; a whole hillside trembling is a whole page in motion, so these hold still.

The fence round the new growth

The real Pando is not short of water. What it is short of is young stems that live long enough to grow, because deer, elk and livestock eat them, and fences round the new growth are what have helped. This fence keeps nothing out. It holds notes, for whoever comes up the hill next.

Pinning a note takes a CB handle and the community password: sign on at the Community Center, then come back. Reading the fence takes nothing.

• Anybody can read it, and only people signed on to the CB can pin a note to it. A handle is whatever somebody typed, so a name on the fence is not proof of who wrote it.
• A note comes down seven days after it goes up, and the fence holds thirty, so a full fence loses its oldest note to make room. There is no archive and no copy. Search engines are asked not to keep it.
• The base station can take a note down sooner, and so can we if you ask: what the tree and the fence keep.
• Nothing on the fence is counted or ranked, and a note says nothing about how often anybody watered.

The real one

Pando is a stand of quaking aspen on the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, about 106 acres of it, and on the evidence of its DNA it is one tree: the Forest Service says it is “thought to be the largest organism in the world”. Every stem in it comes up from one root system, more than forty thousand of them, and its name is Latin for I spread. It was first described and studied in the 1970s.

It is declining, and the Forest Service and scientists are working out why. Utah’s Division of State History says no one cause explains it, and that if one had to be named it would be browsing by deer, elk and livestock, which eat the young stems before they can replace the old ones; fenced enclosures have shown promising signs of it coming back. Watering this one does nothing for that one, and nothing on this page is a way of helping it. It is the idea we borrowed: a lot of stems that turn out to be one living thing.

From the Fishlake National Forest’s page on the Pando clone and the Utah Division of State History’s The Diminishing Pando Clone, both read on 30 September 2026. Nothing about the tree here is from memory.

The name

Pando, and Lando Calrissian, a character in Star Wars. Star Wars is Lucasfilm’s, and the name is the only thing taken from it: nothing else of it is on this page, in the drawing or in the share card, and the tree is not in anybody’s galaxy but ours. The game it is after is our community’s own, from the Collaborative Nonsense channels in our Discord, where a tree grows as people water it.

The room is set in Avería, which Dan Sayers made by averaging every font on his computer; the Libre version is the average of every font Google Web Fonts carried in 2011, so it is hundreds of typefaces at once. It is credited in the liner notes.