Moss and fern in a forest

Imaginative gardeners create spots of eco-friendly forest floors through mulching, compost and the fall of leaves. Add moisture, and nooks of micro-climatic contrast come about. Under a couple of minimally trimmed garden trees the planned organic base invites earthworms and other organisms to approach real forest over time.

Designed plant textures mature into contrasts. Capitalising on shady moisture allow epiphytic mosses, lichen and fern. Lianas from the branches inspire inventive minds into bolder moves.

Collecting pictures of spots in natural forests help to pose the real challenges to the arty copy-cats. Some of the pictures prove too hard to replicate, but let them keep trying! For who knows how long real forests, the pretty and wild ones will still last, the way we’re going?

Many kinds of forest captivated the minds of early generations that explored the earth in its pristine days, but that was in survival mode. Choosing the primitive life today, like being forced into it in those days demands adaptation, vigilance and skill. What was outrageously difficult and life-threatening once may now be only quaint, even romantic, given the resources we have today for defying and obstructing nature. But beware, nature is alive and forever changing. All forest people have to cope with real challenges of some kind.

The behaviour patterns of yesterday's forest people shaped quaint cultures fit to survive in. Forest demands wove overall lifestyles then. Hard but happy days those must have been! Longed for by the aged, having forgotten the struggles of youth. Fortunately circumstances no longer permit them. Do they certify those that talk to the trees?

We rack our brains about where people may still really live in forests. Sympathise, or lucky them? A longing or a fear? All of it still lurks, embedded in and below consciousness of the denying moderns and the post-moderns. So many forest people at heart are stuck in towns. Most don't even know it. The forest still rings a bell. Remembered and recognised, discovered and newly embraced?