Ficus ilicina rock-climbing

One is not always born into conditions that fit the desired style and habit of one’s species. Fortune cookies and lemons are dished out randomly. If one lives, no matter what types of leaves, nails, horns, hairs, sounds or fruits one produces, hanging in there with the biggest plans possible is the norm.

Ficus ilicina will be a stand-alone tree if its fate deprives it of a rockface; resigned to do the single-stem thing with a vengeance.

So much better if first leaves happen to touch rock and it can snuggle, right into old age in the deep future. It celebrates when rock phosphates feed it, fires miss it, destructive passers-by give up on dislodging it and temperatures are just right, like Goldilocks’s porridge (Mannheimer and Curtis, (Eds.), 2009; Coates Palgrave, 2002; iNaturalist).