Reader question: What's going on with this forest?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's new book, forest transitions, and plant of the week
In her book World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores episodes from her life through a menagerie of animals and plants. In the chapter titled “Peacock,” she recalls drawing a bright blue peacock for an art contest in third grade, having just seen the birds while visiting her grandparents in India.
My teacher continues to stalk through the rows of our desks. Some of us misunderstood the assignment, she says. She reaches the front of the room, and clears her throat. Some of us will have to start over and draw American animals. We live in Ah-mer-i-kah! Now she looks right at me. My neck flushes. Anyone who is finished can bring your drawing up to my desk and start your math worksheets. Aimee — The class turns to look at me. Looks like you need a do-over!
I turn my drawing over and blink hard, trying not to let tears fall onto the page. Does she think peacocks can’t live in this country? I saw peacocks at the San Diego Zoo the summer before, and my father once told me that roads are even blocked off for peacocks in Miami, where they can be seen strolling across lawns in the suburbs.
Nezhukumatathil draws a bald eagle instead, “the most American thing I can think of”, and adds in a huge flag in the background.
“This is the story of how I learned to ignore anything from India,” she reflects. But she ultimately turned that lesson on its head. “This is the story of how, for years, I pretended I hated the color blue. But what the peacock can do is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life: My favorite color is peacock blue. My favorite color is peacock blue. My favorite color is peacock blue.”
I’m still casting around for something meaningful to say about what happened on Wednesday in the Capitol building. It’s hard to decide what to do with the feeling of watching something despicable happen hundreds of miles away and not being able to confront it in person. But in reading this passage and seeing this teacher’s confident, unquestioned cruelty, it occurs to me that the racism and xenophobia animating the putsch in Congress are everywhere, that I have to engage it in whatever fronts that I can, and that its roots go back much further than four years ago.
While I happened to read this passage on a strange week, Nezhukumatathil’s book is well worth reading for reasons not related to a coup. Growing up in the Midwest, Arizona, and western New York, she finds lessons for survival and human relationship in creatures as unlikely as the narwhal, vampire squid, and axolotl. Writing about the life cycle of the newt helps her understand her own homing instinct that has brought her to Mississippi as a professor. Throughout, the book finds sources of wonder in nonhuman beings while keeping in touch with the world as it is, rather than burrowing into the safety of an imagined past.
Reader question: What’s going on with this forest?
My friend Joe Earsom writes in from Belgium with an interesting question and photo:
“I’ll be walking in a dense forest of pines and ferns, when all of a sudden the forest seems to dramatically shift to a more deciduous, spaced-out setup,” he writes. “It’s as if there are two micro forests (for lack of better word) next to each other. I must say I expected more of a buffer or transition between them.”
“The interesting part is that there doesn’t seem to be any major topographical differences between the different zones. I also haven’t identified the presence/absence of water features that could explain any changes. To my untrained eye, everything above ground seems quite similar.”
I found that sharp transition fascinating, too — as Joe says, there’s not much aboveground to suggest what’s going on. Perhaps the two sides of the trail have been managed differently in the past, I wondered — but that alone didn’t seem sufficient.
We looked up the webpage for the forest preserve, Meerdaalwoud, and found a helpful clue (after auto-translating from Dutch.) The area has both loess soils, a relatively fertile soil type supporting broadleaf species such as beech and oak, as well as areas of sandy soils with fewer nutrients. After 1740, the sandy areas were planted with coniferous trees.
The photo likely shows a separation between sandy soil on the right, with a legacy of planted conifers (height variation suggests a range of ages) and a primarily beech area on the left. Before 1740, the sandy areas were probably open woodlands or savannahs, which an Enlightenment era forester would probably see as a waste of space, and so hardy pines were jammed in so that there was a complete canopy. The aesthetic of the time was more Versailles than Central Park: sharp, artificial lines, maximal productivity everywhere. (Using similar logic of maximizing productivity on sandy soil, the botanist Charles Bessey sought to replant the Nebraska Sandhills with pines. That’s a story for another time.)
In more recent decades, forestry preferences have shifted to a more self-regulated appearance. The legacy of planting and cultivation is partially obscured by years of the forest doing its thing.
When there are vegetation differences that are hard to explain, it’s usually something to do with soil — but that alone isn’t a very satisfying explanation. Here, rather than just soil, it’s something like soil + human actions + time. Human ideas about how a place should look and what types of wildlife are of value have the power to shape a cascade of decisions that leave a lasting imprint.
Plant of the week: Haircap moss
A reliable source of green in winter, this haircap moss (Polytrichum) was growing on the edge of a former cranberry bog. Active cranberry bogs sometimes consider such plants a pest. The genus is found nearly worldwide, with about 70 species adapted to all sorts of climates. The common haircap moss (Polytrichum commune) grows the largest in this region, sometimes towering to a height of over six inches! Megamoss!
I’ve often wondered how moss survives in pretty dry spots without vascular tissue. Polytrichum has a unique adaptation to this end. Unlike other mosses, its leaves have multiple layers of cells, with a top surface arranged like “closely parallel brick walls”. Moisture is trapped between those walls, helping prevent water loss.
The beauty of moss lies in both in the blaze of green color seen from a distance as well as the astonishing details of its plant structures seen close up. My camera isn’t up to the task, but Illinois Wildflowers has some great images of P. commune that I invite you to check out.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.