Tasmania’s mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) is the world’s tallest flowering plant. It can grow 100 metres tall and live for more than 600 years.

These trees play a crucial role in their ecosystems, providing habitat and contributing to the overall health of the shared living world. But their numbers are dwindling due to logging, land degradation, fire and climate change.

This sad situation is indicative of a much bigger problem: humans consistently undervalue plants, despite having much to learn from them.

At Deep Design Lab, we design and build homes for wildlife, learning from successful solutions in the natural world. To compensate for the loss of large hollows in large old trees, our team has 3D-printed nest boxes for owls and other species. We have also studied what makes a good tree for birds, to replicate the design.

Our recent research on Tasmania’s large old eucalypts has given me another reason to reflect on the many things about trees that urban planners, designers and the public could learn from. Here are the top five.

People often cut down dead trees for fear they might fall, causing injury to humans or damage to property. They also tend to remove fallen logs and branches, to tidy up.

But dead trees

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