Creature of the Shade

google abstract

 

As art, it looks early 20th century, doesn't it?  (Click to enlarge.)  Some forgotten acolyte of Mondrian, perhaps, who never made it as a modernist because he couldn't let go of earth tones.

This one is in a bottomland southwest of Toowoomba, Queensland.  Bottomlands in general are a feast for the abstract-loving eye, as they are the only landscapes without much trace of a watercourse.    Amid these vigorous patches and stripes, the roads are reduced to gossamer, while the dotting of farmstead buildings, each with its little drive from the nearest road, jostles the eye pleasantly, like an intentional imperfection that reveals the purity of the rest. 

(Previous Google Abstract post, and manifesto, here.)

confronting vegetation: Archontophoenix cunninghamiana

Australia's "Bangalow Palm," Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, is a graceful feather palm that manages to evoke both tropical lushness and Victorian reserve.

Photo:  J. D. Andersen Nursery

But dense forests of them have quite a different effect.  A month ago I had a few hours in one, in the Tambourine National Park just south of Brisbane.  These rainforests have a simple structure: Bangalow palms everywhere.

The palms grow so close together that a cross-country thrasher would have to turn sideways to get between them.  The mature ones form a canopy of jammed, colliding fronds about 8m high.  Like all palms (and unlike trees) they don't get wider with age.  The juveniles look just like adults but shorter, so that in addition to the solid ceiling of fronds above, complete sets of fronds also appear at various heights, slowly rising into the canopy as if on hydraulic lifts.

The groundcover is mostly sprouts of the same palm.  In fact, the ground is so heavily littered with dead fronds that it's remarkable anything gets started at all.

Here and there are very old, very large trees, suggestive of some larger, older forest that predates the crowding palms ...  

 

... but identifying these great trees is impossible.  The park has put signs on a few, such as this Castanospermum australe or "black bean" ...

 

... but the tree's leaves, flowers, and fruits hang tens of meters above the ground, far above the enclosing canopy of palms, so they can only be identified by their droppings on the ground, such as these spent pods next to the tree above:

The effect is a bit like a modern art museum where a discreet tag on the wall refers to a pile of rubbish or nails on the floor, identifying it as art.  The trunk of the tree is merely the wall, and while the tag may refer to a soaring Platonic form in some idealised realm above the canopy, we can only make sense of it through its shadows and droppings under our feet.

Very rarely, of course, a big tree falls. 

This old fig came down quite recently, tearing a hole in the forest and knocking palms right and left.

 

 

The surviving palms look almost sheepish in the sudden light, like crowd at an accident that it really shouldn't be enjoying.  

 

The blasting invasion of sunlight is hell on photography, of course.  But the great torn trunk, viewed backlit from below, seemed almost on fire, especially as seen by a light-hungry digital camera.

thrash, hack

When I mentioned in my Age of Aquarius post that Phil and I had been "hacking our way through trackless rainforest," Phil objected that "hacking" suggested that we had had machetes, and also (he added later) that we were moving through the forest in a rather destructive way.

I wondered what verb would give me the sense of "hacking, but without machetes and therefore (a) more environmentally sensitive but also (b) much more difficult and hence (c) ultimately a more compelling tale."

Teresa offered "thrashing."  Close.  In place of the decisive male hard-k of hacking, thrashing offers a sibilant, the sound of plants brushing past us, and the awkward sound of "thr" gets a bit of the leftright lurching quality of our motion.

So yes, we were thrashing, and on the way, I was waving the camera about.  The blurriest ones seem best at recalling the experience.

 

 

This rainforest huddles on the eastfacing slopes of the Illawarra Escarpment, near Austinmer between Sydney and Wollongong.  Apart from the stinging trees (Dendrocnide) and various prickly shrubs, the biggest obstacle was presented by lianas -- vines that have thickened into woody trunks while retaining their scribbly form.  

(Like "mangrove", "liana" is not a species but a lifestlyle; many unrelated plants have learned to grow this way.)

As often in rainforests, the only real view is at the edge.  With the rainforest all around you, it's hard to see figure and ground, and even harder to manage the uneven light, which explains my abstract expressionism above.  Only at the edge, where the rainforest gives way to sunny slopes awash with exotic Lantana, could I form a conventional view.