White Beech: The Rainforest Years Read Online Free Page B

until gradually the faster-growing trees will shade the others out. Some of the outstripped trees will die, others will accept life in the understorey, and still more will wait for a neighbouring tree to fall. Meanwhile the trees that are pushing towards the sky will sacrifice their lateral branches, as the canopy lifts further and further off the ground. Trees that top out over the others will spread their canopies, snaring more and more of the light. On the forest floor a galaxy of shade-loving organisms will begin to appear – mosses, fungi, groundcovers, ferns. With them will come hundreds of invertebrate species. Eventually the forest achieves equilibrium, but this is not static. The key to the forest’s survival is competition. Trees growing in forest communities behave differently from trees of the same species growing in the open. Even as the forest trees vie with each other for light, they are protected from extreme weather, from wind and frost and parching sun; often they are bound together by vines. The more time you spend in a forest the more aware you become that it is an organism intent upon its own survival.
    Chief members of the forest community are the trees that together create the shelter, the mild temperatures and the humidity upon which the other plant and animal life depends. In most of the subtropical rainforest of eastern Australia, sixty or so species of trees support a couple of hundred other plant species. In the Cave Creek forest, which is both riparian and montane, there are more than twice as many tree species as the norm. Some of the vines that knit the trees together can grow to such massive size that they drag their supporters to the ground. Looping along the slopes at Cave Creek you can find the great writhing trunks of woody vines that have outlived several generations of rainforest trees. Conversely many mature trees have barley-sugar trunks, showing where a now-vanished vine once constricted them. The trees being the underpinning, the armature of the forest, it stands to reason that anyone thinking of rebuilding a forest would choose to begin by planting them. This is not the only way however, and there are good reasons for clearing weeds and leaving the forest to regenerate spontaneously. I chose to take the planting option.
    Many people who plant trees live to rue the day, as their chosen tree grows much bigger than they expected, cracking drains, ripping up pavements, filling guttering with shed leaves and twiggery. Suburban gardens are full of trees that have outgrown the available space, looming dangerously over houses, cars and passers-by. My mother took steps to eliminate any tree that she suspected of shading the house, regardless of whether it grew on her own ground or somebody else’s. Any eucalypt that dared to shed a single sheet of bark onto our lawn was doomed. My mother’s intolerance of trees may have been exacerbated by my father’s habit of warbling Joyce Kilmer’s famous but fatuous poem when he was in the shower. This, in the setting by Oscar Rasbach, had been a great hit for Paul Robeson in the year I was born.
     
    I think that I shall never see
    A poem lovely as a tree.
     
    A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
    Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
    A tree that looks at God all day
    And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
     
    A tree that may in summer wear
    A nest of robins in her hair;
     
    Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
    Who intimately lives with rain.
     
    Poems are made by fools like me,
    But only God can make a tree.
     
    The poem is arrant nonsense, with which my mother had as little patience as I. Trees don’t have mouths or hair or bosoms, don’t have to be sexualised in order to be praised and shouldn’t be encumbered with gender. You have to wonder whether Kilmer had ever really looked at a tree. What you get to understand when you live with trees is that they are not to be trifled with. The lords of the forest are mysterious and frightening,