TALL TREES
I‘m standing at the base of Lathamus Keep, watching tree climber and photographer Steve Pearce attach my harness to an orange rope no thicker than my finger. It's one of four climbing lines he and his crew have set, using light lines attached to weighted throw bags – an impressive mission when the first branch is 25 metres up. The tree's moss-patterned trunk is a wall of wood before me, twice as wide as my outstretched arms. I squint into the January-bright canopy.
“How far up are we going?” I ask.
“The line's set at 70 metres,” Pearce says, with the casual tone of a person who has spent thousands of hours aloft.
“And how tall's the tree?”
“Eighty metres. Biggest blue gum in the universe.”
Biggest blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) in the universe, roughly the size of the launch structure of NASA's Artemis Moon mission, and it's just an hour and a half from nipaluna/Hobart.
“This forest is called the Grove of Giants,” explained the endlessly enthusiastic canopy ecologist Dr Jen Sanger, as she led me through the dappled dreamscape of wet eucalypt forest that morning. “There's about 150 trees here over four metres in diameter, so it's just jam packed with giant old trees.”
The forests of lutruwita/Tasmania are one of just three places in the world where trees grow above 80m. In the teeming rainforests of Borneo, yellow meranti trees soar up to 100m; the fogshrouded west coast of North America creates the perfect conditions for temperate rainforest species to reach even more epic proportions; here, five species of eucalypt shoot up above the smaller rainforest trees to become islands in the sky.
This giant, Lathamus Keep, is named for the habitat it provides the endangered swift parrot (Lathamus discolor). Its deeply furrowed buttress resembles giant fingers driving tip-first into the soil; lanky saplings shoot up out of the gnarly metacarpals, their roots gripping onto knuckles for structure.
It's circled by decay: dropped leaves and broken branches and strips of shed bark longer than I am tall, make the surrounding trees look like they're dripping with candlewax.
I've spent hundreds of hours walking through forests before – I consider myself a tree person. But I often ignore them. They're everywhere, every day. Yet in the kaleidoscope of information relayed to my brain every millisecond, trees usually don't make the cut. And I'm not alone: US botanists coined the term “plant-blindness” to describe this inability. It's not universal, but it's a real phenomenon for a great chunk of us humans.
Right now, I'm the least plant blind I've ever been. I attach my foot ascender to the climbing line and shift my weight off the ground. Suspended, gently spinning, it's impossible not to pay full attention to this living, breathing being. My life now depends
