This is the 2,000-year-old welwistchia, a plant that lives only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola. It has two leaves which it never sheds. PHOTO: Rachel Sussman

This isn’t a rock, it’s actually moss from a Chilean desert, and it’s been there for more than 2,000 years. PHOTO: Rachel Sussman

This Swedish spruce is nearly 10,000 years old, but you can see the effects of the last 50 years of climate change in its new growth patterns. PHOTO: Rachel Sussman

This creosote bush has just been minding its own business for 12,000 years. PHOTO: Rachel Sussman

A photographer’s pilgrimage to see the world’s oldest. Before the signs of climate change sees them disappear.

In 2007, photographer Rachel Sussman made a pilgrimage to Florida’s 3,500-year-old Senator Tree. The pond cypress’s mottled gray trunk stretched 125 feet into the sky, and sported a bronze plaque gifted by Calvin Coolidge in 1929. Sussman snapped a few pictures, but, upon review, wasn’t thrilled with the results. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just come back sometime,'” she remembers.

Five years later, a meth user snuck into a space in the trunk of the tree, lit up, and burned the whole thing down. Sussman came back and photographed the charred remains. “It really was this moment challenging my sense of permanence and impermanence,” she says.

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