Thongtree

Poul Anderson fans are on familiar territory when they read this description of a scene on the planet, Bellevue:

"It was in heavy forest, oak and wild cherry and pine..."
-The Forge, CHAPTER SIX, p. 77.

We might think, "Oak, cherry and pine? This is an extra-solar planet!" However, the sentence continues:

"...and native thongtree, tall reddish-ochre things with smooth bark and a cluster of thin whippy branches on top, big sword-shaped leaves set like feathers along the edges of each." (ibid.)

That is more like it: the by now familiar mixed ecology - which was already evident in CHAPTER ONE, p. 3, the opening page of the text, where a spersauroid killed a rat:

"One of the few pleasant things about living in East Residence was that Terran life had mostly replace the local. But not in the catacombs, it seemed." (p. 3)

Here is a quiz for Poul Anderson fans:

How many extraterrestrial trees are there in the Technic History?
On which planets?
And which of them has lethal thin whipping branches?