Well done. My only experience with 'mean' trees were the Black Palms in Panama. If you lose your footing on a muddy mountain trail, your instinct is to thrown your arms out to grab something, anything to keep from sliding a dozen yards back down the trail. As you described for others, the Black Palm is studded with rings of two inch long thorns, grabbing a handful of trunk impales your hands. I brushed up against one and the thorn stuck me just below the knee. Months later, back in Washington the remnant of the thorn pierced through the skin above my knee when I could finally pull it out.
It's interesting that my interest was much more focused on the details of the naughty forests than on the pleasures of the nice ones. I really enjoyed your concept of ranking forests. Maybe we could use a metric Tschinkel Scale, with 10 Tschinkel's be most heavenly, 0 most hellish.
I love this idea of ranking forests by meanness, not something I would have thought of at all but makes perfect sense! Now I’m thinking about what other inanimate objects I can classify on an emotional scale for creative writing.
Wonderful descriptions of the forests, I enjoyed learning about new plants. The lawyer vine is weird, wonderful, and I also agree, downright terrifying.
Thanks, I look forward to your rankings. By the way, there is an aerial tramway in Daintree National Park in Australia where you see the forest from above and can see the climbing palms in the canopy forty to sixty meters above the ground.
Well done. My only experience with 'mean' trees were the Black Palms in Panama. If you lose your footing on a muddy mountain trail, your instinct is to thrown your arms out to grab something, anything to keep from sliding a dozen yards back down the trail. As you described for others, the Black Palm is studded with rings of two inch long thorns, grabbing a handful of trunk impales your hands. I brushed up against one and the thorn stuck me just below the knee. Months later, back in Washington the remnant of the thorn pierced through the skin above my knee when I could finally pull it out.
It's interesting that my interest was much more focused on the details of the naughty forests than on the pleasures of the nice ones. I really enjoyed your concept of ranking forests. Maybe we could use a metric Tschinkel Scale, with 10 Tschinkel's be most heavenly, 0 most hellish.
Can't the birds also kick you to death in the Australian rain forest?
Yeah, well that would be a pretty big negative for the Australian forest, wouldn't it? I would put cassowaries in the mean column.
I love this idea of ranking forests by meanness, not something I would have thought of at all but makes perfect sense! Now I’m thinking about what other inanimate objects I can classify on an emotional scale for creative writing.
Wonderful descriptions of the forests, I enjoyed learning about new plants. The lawyer vine is weird, wonderful, and I also agree, downright terrifying.
Thanks, I look forward to your rankings. By the way, there is an aerial tramway in Daintree National Park in Australia where you see the forest from above and can see the climbing palms in the canopy forty to sixty meters above the ground.
Yikes!