“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkiens.
Not exactly a plantation.
There are certain places where we will only ever be visitors.
Deep in the temperate rainforests of Tasmania, it is moist, gloomy and generally cool. The soil smells of decomposing organic matter, and the ground is coated in moss and lichen. This is the prehistoric world of plants; and animal life is rare. Occasionally, a bird will call, but mostly there is silence, except for the whispering leaves in the wind. Warm blooded creatures tend to hang out somewhere else.
Handsome fungi.
This is the world of plants and fungi. When the plants die, when the trees fall down, the intricate network of fungi within the soil go to work, break down the timber, and make these nutrients available for other trees and plants to take up again. And when these fungi are ready to reproduce, we see the mushrooms pop up. But these are only a small part of a much larger organism hidden beneath the ground. The fine filaments of the fungi, or mycelium networks are so numerous that there can be kilometres of these filaments beneath a single footstep.
Two frozen ents, captured in time.
The ents in Tolkiens’ world were the tree protectors, the guardians. They were quite like trees themselves, except they could move. They would talk in really long sentences, because they have seen a lot and they had plenty of time.
I feel that we need more ents in our current time. We need beings who move slow and talk slow, and look out for the trees’ well being. We need elves too, the companions to the human race, except fairer, wiser and with eternal lives. Creatures whose wisdom exceeds ours, and creatures that we could look to, in order to help our own disheveled lives.
Where else would the elves live, but here, among the oldest trees? I haven’t found them yet, but this doesn’t mean that I will stop looking.
A.S. 10/3/22, Lenah Valley.
Fractals in the rainforest.