I grew up on the West Coast of Canada loving the woods and mountains that I had the freedom to explore. My love of structure and anatomy in living systems led to a career in surgery.
As I grew closer to retiral my attention turned increasingly to plant systems. I love learning about their form and function as well as their interactions with each other and their habitat.
It was years later that I realised that the magical forests of my childhood were temperate rainforest and I was even slower to recognise temperate rainforest here in the West of Scotland.
Title of the project
Plants of the Temperate Rainforest: understorey and epiphytes
About the project
Temperate rainforest is a rare ecosystem covering less than one percent of Earth’s land area. It can grow in cool damp, high rainfall areas at middle latitudes.
Key features are epiphytes - plants growing on other plants - and plentiful deadwood being colonised and broken down by fungi, mosses and lichens. This creates soil that is consistently damp but well-drained where plants get up off the damp forest floor to colonise nurse logs, living and dead trees and drystone walls.
Ordinary plants may adopt unusual growth habits in these places. I have depicted five common native plants that thrive in temperate rainforest.
