These notes are a written version of my talk given at the CARMA workshop in June 2017, with some additional material. I presented a few concepts that have recently been used in the computation of tree-level scattering amplitudes (mostly using pure spinor methods but not restricted to it) in a context that could be of interest to the combinatorics community. In particular, I focused on the appearance of {\it planar binary trees} in scattering amplitudes and presented some curious identities obeyed by related objects, some of which are known to be true only via explicit examples.