So if I were driving through Harupa Valley in California, a city of around 100,000 people,

just about an hour east of LA, I might drive past a certain rocky gully.

And you can see in this gully this kind of scraggly collection of shrubs at the top of this hill.

And the shrubs, they're basically clinging to this rocky ridge

that overlooks warehouses and horse trails and ATV tracks.

Nothing particularly remarkable.

I would probably drive right past them.

Wouldn't think about them again.

As it turns out, these are not ordinary shrubs. They are something much stranger. They are this

kind of undying clone, this tree that is born over and over again,

and is thought to be one of the oldest living things

on the planet.

It's also kind of in the way.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is out with Subsura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we hear the story of how these sort of nondescript

bushes wound up turning a local city council debate in California into a national story and the fallout from finding that your

local shrub is older than the invention of agriculture.

More after this. Here to tell us the story of this collection of shrubbery, really,

tree is Shannon Osaka.

She is a climate reporter at the Washington Post,

and she recently wrote an article all about this.

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