The Power of Forests: A Beautiful Story of Growth and Resilience

Beautiful story (28): once flowed a stream.

Plant history today. It’s a small park in a Geneva town. On one side a road borders it. On the other, large trees more than a hundred years old shelter squirrels and birds.

Formerly, at the foot of these trees, flowed a stream. It has been dried, diverted or buried to make way for urbanization. We don’t see him anymore. Only a furrow remains which marks the meadow like a scar.

The rain is lacking, the meadow does not grow. The rare and weak showers since the end of June barely repainted the grass green for a few days. Municipal gardeners have not mowed for six weeks.

Yet strange young shoots invade the park. These are very young trees grown from seed. According to the plant identification app Seek (equivalent to Shazam but for plants) it would be poplars.

We are used to seeing the prairie-forest boundary as very clear, well-defined. Here we see that the prairie is populated by these trees in the making.

The forest tries to progress. When you let it be, it can be fast. The shoots are about twenty meters from the tall trees. They have no predator, no animal nibbles them. The only predator is the gardener’s mower.

And without a mower the young trees grow at a good pace: 40 cm in 6 weeks, almost 1 cm per day.

Without human intervention to limit it, the forest will take over everything. As in Prypiat: 37 years after the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the forest redraws the abandoned city.

It will recreate humus, exhale aerosols to form clouds, maintain freshness and humidity as long as the rains give it life.