> you can't kill them

If you're trying to do carbon capture, maybe this is a feature? Assume you mean that literally, and you can just chop one down and another will grow in its place, that's pretty great, since trees only capture carbon when they are growing.

That's exactly what they say in the article, if you cut the tree down, another will grow from the stump, they are quite literally grass-trees

And yeah, this is actually a huge bonus for carbon capture!

Then it will be great to constantly log them down and sell them as carbon credit.

To sell them as carbon credits, you’d have to bury the logs or something — otherwise they might burn, or their mass would be absorbed by other animals/fungi/bacteria which would eventually convert the carbon into CO2.

I beleive the traditional solution is to turn them into furniture. Or houses! Building with farmed wood is very eco friendly since it produces a negative amount of CO2.

That just delays the CO2 release. Furniture breaks. Houses get old and get demolished. Even if it takes 100 or 500 years, it will happen.

You need to store wood long-term somehow. Or burn it and store CO2 underground, turning it into rock.

True. But if we could buy a couple hundred years, that would be amazing with the timescales we're looking at now.

Yup. Looks like they're often classified "invasive" --

http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-on...

All I remember about empress trees is the extremely strong smell of the flowers. Not very pleasant, to me.

>A lot of people hate them though, for the same reason outlined in the article: you can't kill them. Many consider them weeds.

I reread the article and I see no mention of it?

This page has a good overview:

http://www.tsusinvasives.org/home/database/paulownia-tomento...

>...its ability to sprout prolifically from adventitious buds on stems and roots allows it to survive fire, cutting and even bulldozing in construction areas; making it difficult to remove from established areas.

>...

> Cutting or girdling trees with power or manual saws are effective at preventing seed production, but an herbicide treatment is necessary following cutting since Paulownia readily re-sprouts. Hand pulling may be effective for young seedlings. Plants should be pulled as soon as they are large enough to grasp. Seedlings are best pulled after a rain when the soil is loose. The entire root must be removed since broken fragments may re-sprout. Cutting or pulling is the preferred mechanical treatments of the Paulownia tormentosa; do not use fire because this species is able to survive fire and then quickly proliferates and out-competes native tree species post-fire.

They mention it’s “easy to regrow from the stump” what that means is cutting it down doesn’t kill it. Additionally many trees that easily regrow from a cut stump also regrow/produce new tree from their roots.

Seems like a recipe for an invasive plant (much like those awful pear trees the were used for landscaping)

After one research it seems like only one variant of Paulownia is "invasive" - as in super aggressively spreading, but it does make me wonder if have acres and acres filled with them will result in some mutant offspring developing the super aggressive spread that the species is clearly capable of. Very much like what happened with that invasive pear [1]

[1] I dug up the article https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-tur...

It also seems handy for growing timber. There seems to be a growing market for it too. https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-...

It's in a caption of one of the images:

> "After the first year of growth, trees are cut down to the stump, the rest sold for timber. This process, called coppicing, promotes bigger and straighter growth the following year."

That should be a method of carbon sequestration.

Huge leaves creep me out for some reason. I think it's because small leaves are normal in my region--I associate big ones with tropical regions, rainforests, jungles, etc. When I see a fast-growing tree with a narrow stalk and big leaves, it can't hurt me of course, but it vaguely arouses the same disgust as a parasite or fungus.

They are beautiful, grow absolutely huge at maturity, and produce lovely (enormous) bluish-purple flowers. The leaves are comically huge, and the seed casings form a sort of organic baby rattle. It's wild.