The Secret Life of the Forest by Richard M. Ketchum

Author:Richard M. Ketchum [Richard M. Ketchum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature/Plants/Trees
ISBN: 9781640190337
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2017-02-13T20:00:00+00:00

When early European voyagers approached the land that is now the United States, they were enchanted by the land smell that told them they were nearing shore. This was actually the perfume of a dense, unbroken wilderness that extended from the seashore to the Mississippi River, and to a man like Arthur Barlowe, who coasted along North Carolina in 1584 and reported his findings to Sir Walter Raleigh, it was a wondrous thing indeed. “The second of July,” he wrote, “we found shole water, wher we smelt so sweet, and so strong a smel, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured, that the land could not be farre distant . . .” After going ashore and surveying the rich vegetation, he concluded that “in all the world the like abundance is not to be found: and my selfe having seene those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written. . . .”

It had been hundreds of years since any other European had seen anything even remotely resembling what Barlowe witnessed. There are numerous references to forests in classical writings: Homer speaks frequently of “wooded Samothrace” or the “tall pines and oaks of Sicily,” but these woodlands had largely disappeared from the ancient world. The forests had been cleared by man, and his sheep and goats and cattle had altered forever the nature of the landscape bordering parts of the Mediterranean and Aegean. Even at the time of Greece’s glory, Plato was writing that “What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having been wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left.”

To the colonists settling America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the apparently endless woods, unbroken except by rivers and mountain crags, were a wonder that made an enduring impression. It was said that a squirrel could make its way from the eastern end of Pennsylvania to the western boundary without ever leaving the trees, so thick was the cover, and certainly only a bird flying over the ancient forest could take in its immensity. A person traveling through Pennsylvania in 1806 remarked on the “extraordinary height and spreading tops of the trees; which thus prevent the sun from penetrating to the ground, and nourishing inferior articles of vegetation. In consequence of the above circumstance, one can walk in them with much pleasure, and see an enemy from a considerable distance.” Parts of that country were called the “black forest” by pioneers because the vegetation shut out the sun so completely, and General Edward Braddock’s route to destiny in 1755 took his army through an almost impenetrable gloom known locally as the “shades of death.”

Evidently, this rank deciduous and white-pine forest was a world of silence by day, for most of the songbirds that populate more open woods

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