Hey! Look who's back! Yes, it's Mark's Tree of the Week posts - now delightfully modified into Plant of the Week posts, so as to give me more stuff to type about. Aren't you excited, o my invisible and probably nonexistent audience? I'll bet you are!

So, anyway, it's a little late to post this entry, since its subject, Aruncus dioicus, stopped blooming a few weeks ago. But, goddammit, I've got photographs, I've done some research, and I'm a-gonna write about this plant! SO, without further ado, I present to you...

Goatsbeard, Aruncus dioicus



Synonyms: "Bride's Feathers", Spiræa aruncus, Spiræa paniculata, Aruncus sylvester.

Range and Habitat: A. dioicus is a relatively common but quite spectacular garden plant in temperate gardens. And so this author was delighted to find out that the species is native to our eastern woodlands, growing as an understory shrub in deciduous forests and wooded savannas. However, its introduction to human horticulture was not achieved by the American Indians, nor by the early European invaders; no, it was known, at least casually, to Homo sapiens long before there were any members of our species on this side of the Bering Strait. For goatsbeard is an extremely wide-ranging species, native to American forests on both sides of the Great Plains, and also to temperate forests right across Eurasia.

Native? Y/N: Y, although horticultural varieties may be from eurasian or western subspecies, and likely hybridize freely with wild eastern plants.

Plant ID: The plant may be most readily known by its flowers, dainty cream-colored things arranged in long, foamy spikes. These spectacular flowers come into blossom, 'round these parts, beginning in mid-June and continuing 'till around the end of that month. Goat's beard is dioecious, meaning that it produces male and female flowers on different plants. The two sexes look very similar, save that the male plants have many, many long stamens per flower, whereas the female flowers produce only three pistils each. This makes the male blooms somewhat more feathery in profile, which is considered desirable by gardeners.

When its flashy flowers are absent, goatsbeard may best be known by its leaves. These are similar to those of a rose, but larger, with deeper teeth, and are doubly compound rather than merely singly compound. These leaves can be rather large, extending up to 3 feet from the plant's short woody stem.

Ecology: A. dioicus is a native inhabitant of moist, temperate woodlands nearly worldwide, and it is excellently adapted to the conditions found in such ecosystems. It is very tolerant of the shade put forth whatever trees overhang its fronds, and its roots love the rich humus accumulated over thousands of autumns and mixed by millions of worms. In winter, its hardened buds can withstand the harshest of conditions, and it is rated as hardy to temperatures as low as -40º C (-40º F). In order to ensure its spread over the widest possible range, goatsbeard has designed its flowers to be appealing to all variety of pollinators. Pollinator.org claims that it is visited by bees, beetles, and butterflies alike, and I frequently observed soldier beetles sunbathing on its bright flowers. Soldier beetles are common garden predators who devour aphids and other small arthropod pests, making their presence a sight to be greeted with joy by the savvy gardener or conservationist. They also, according to Wikipedia, supplement their protein diet with small sips of nectar and pollen, and so pull double duty as minor pollinators of their hosts. Goatsbeard is also, according to my sources, relatively resistant to the attentions of deer and other herbivores, bound to be an advantage in the overbrowsed and predator free forests of the modern world.

Uses and Horticulture: Goatsbeard has significant decorative and ecological importance. In the former role, it is frequently planted in decorative borders and in naturalistic woodland gardens. In the latter role, it provides food and habitat for a wide variety of generally beneficial insect species, who are important parts of the ecosystems on which our society's wealth still depends.

The cultivation of goatsbeard is relatively easy, so long as it is given a rich soil and sufficient water, the lack of which will predispose the plant to sun scorching, especially when it is planted in sunnier spots. The plant can also be damaged by too much water, though, as its roots are intolerant of long periods of soil saturation. But given these limitations, goatsbeard will grow into a lush shrub with but little attention.

According to what lore I've been able to find, the root of A. dioicus, when ground, may be used to soothe bee stings, and its leaves may be made into an infusion that supposedly relieves aching limbs. But these herbalist prescriptions should be taken with a grain of salt; certainly, I have found no peer-reviewed studies investigating their efficacy. What should not be taken with a grain of salt - or at all, really - are the seeds of goatsbeard. As a mother bear will defend her cubs with tooth and claw, so does a mother goatsbeard protect her ripe seed capsules with disagreeable and toxic chemicals.

Taxonomy: Though it might seem hard to connect the ivory spikes of Goatsbeard with the carnal convolutions of a Rose petal, in truth the two flowers are in the same family, the mighty Rosaceae. This seems less strange when one remembers the beautiful inflorescent racemes of the mighty black cherry, Prunus serotina, also in the Rosaceae. Prunus and Aruncus are also, incidentally, both in the same subfamily, the Spiraeoideae, which also includes meadowsweet, Arizona rosewood, and, if recent molecular analyses are to be believed, such ubiquities as the apple tree, the hawthorn, and the sacred Rowan tree.

Ubiquitous since 1986,
--mark

It's pretty late, and I really should be getting to sleep, especially as I'm going to be waking up early in order to get some work done (I've started trying to take advantage of the fact that it's much easier for me to keep my focus early in the day than it is at night), but I've got to talk to somebody about my brilliant idea, and if I don't do it now, I probably never will. So here it goes:

I want to write a novel.

I know, I know, I know, it's a horrible cliché for some pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag like myself to go on about how he's going to write the Great American Novel - or some such claptrap - someday, he just needs to get his act together, or go through the right amount of personal growth, or whatever. But, y'see, I've got a really good idea for a novel.

It all started while I was reading House of Leaves (by Mark Z. Danielewski) over vacation. If you're not familiar with that particular book, it's a surrealistic, experimental, Joycean, hyper-postmodern, and trés hip Gothic horror novel about a family that finds a strange, geometrically impossible corridor in their house. This corridor leads to a strange labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors, doorways, and stairs, an almost featureless infinity of repeating chambers as barren as the Antarctic, and uninhabited save for the possibly imaginary Minotaur that lurks malevolently within. It's a damn fine book, and if it doesn't live up to its own hype (it did not, for example, drive me into black pits of existential despair about the ultimate meaninglessness and inhuman horror of that incomprehensible beast we so glibly call Reality, but that might just be because I've already been there, done that, and got the goddamn T-shirt) it did pretty well establish itself as the single best literary definition of the "postmodern ethos", if such a thing can be said to exist*.

Over the course of the novel, the inhabitants of the titular house hire some professional adventurers - y'know, National Geographic type guys - to explore this strange labyrinth that has so mysteriously appeared inside their house. They go in equipped with mountaineering gear, food rations, scientific instruments, all-weather clothing, etc., etc. They are highly organized and well-trained. And, of course, the house defeats them utterly, driving the expedition leader so insane that he tries to kill all of his team mates, and then devouring him. Although much of the symbolism of the novel is baroque and incomprehensible (and deliberately so!), this whole sequence pretty unambiguously represents the perceived failure of rationality and science to truly understand the truest and deepest mysteries of Existence.

Except...well, I'm pretty well-versed in the literature and history of exploration. Over the years, I've become familiar with the rhetoric used in discussing all those grand adventures: the races to the poles, the exploration of Amazonia, the European conquest of North America and Australia, etc., etc. And all this talk about how "there are some things which will always be beyond then ken of mere Humans; there are some things which are so far beyond us that they defy our pitiful attempts at conquest."** - this is the sort of talk that would be trotted out after the early failures, sure, but eventually it always proved to be pretty hollow. They said it about Antarctica; they said it about the Amazon basin; they said it about the highest peaks of the Alps and Himalayas both; they're still saying it about the oceans sometimes, though you'd really think that people would have learned by now. But, later expeditions would analyze the mistakes of their predecessors, learn from them, refine their techniques, improve on their organization, and try again. These later expeditions wouldn't always succeed immediately, but eventually, once enough ingenuity and organization was applied to the problem, they'd make the goal. And so it came to pass that now there are several permanent manned bases in Antarctica, and we worry more about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest than about the fate of the various research groups regularly sent there by the Smithsonian and other such institutions.

My point is that the "fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe" is a philosophical concept that doesn't get very much support from actual human experience. I mean, hell, let's take modern Physics, the discipline most frequently pointed to by academics as justification for their use of this particular rhetorical device. According to the standard story, the Victorian belief in Reason and Progress was shattered by the work of Planck, Heisenberg, Gödel, et al., who conclusively showed that the universe is unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like. Said academics and intellectuals have been operating under this assumption (and the tacit secondary assumption that this is depressing - see here) for the past eight-odd decades. Meanwhile, the physicists have been going on to quantify, with greater and greater accuracy, just how unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like the universe is, and the engineers and computer scientists have been finding ever-more powerful ways of taking advantage of the universe's instability, subjectivity, irrationality, and dreaminess so as to better serve Civilization and Capitalism. No, what the evidence suggests, my Dear Readers, is that even such things as the fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe are no match for the ingenuity, organization, and ability to learn from our mistakes of us xenocidal plains apes.***

And that's what I want my novel to be about. I want it to be a sci-fi novel, about a group of explorers investigating some truly strange artefact that seems completely incomprehensible, and completely inimical to human life, much like the house of Danielewski's novel, or the endless realm of Stairs of that strange little surrealist story I wrote in high school.^ Or Arthur C. Clarke's enigmatic spaceship Rama, from his fabulous Rendezvous With Rama - one of the great classics of science fiction. Or Borgés' mocking "Library of Babel". Or H.P. Lovecraft's Antarctic "Lost City of the Old Ones" from At the Mountains of Madness. Countless other expeditions have been mounted to explore it and understand its secrets before this one, but they all tried and failed - or, more commonly, tried and died. The object has been given up as a lost cause, as a Moby Dick-like symbol of the enigmatic, inhuman strangeness of the universe - and of our own incomprehensible minds. It drives people insane and devours them within its uncaring self. It is a whispered object of terror throughout the civilized world (or solar system, or whatever).

But this latest expedition is different. Like Amundsen's successful journey to the South Pole - the first in history - this expedition is planned as unromantically as possible. The organizers have learned from the past, and are as thoroughly prepared for the insanity-inducing strangeness of the artefact as possible. If it has any secrets, they will uncover them. And if its secret is that it has none - well, then they'll uncover that, instead. With the dull thoroughness of a CPA, they will categorize the impossible, measure the inconceivable, and chart the subjective. Like the Red Queen, they will do six impossible things before breakfast every day, until they have become thoroughly bored with mere impossibility.

On the flip side of this obsessive utilitarianism will be the artefact itself^^. It really is as grand and imposing and enigmatic as all that, and it not only provides a serious challenge to the expedition and a source of High Adventure, but it also provides a source of deep fascination as well. After all, just because the Amazon rainforest didn't prove to be as "unconquerable" as previous generations made it out to be doesn't mean that it's not completely awesome. Because it is. And this artefact should be completely awesome, too; something that draws one in with its otherworldliness, its beauty, and its scientific interestingness.

To emphasize both sides, I'd like to tell the story primarily through curt dispatches from the expedition, reports of scientific findings, technical briefings, "captain's logs", and other such material. The book itself is to be a reflection of the obsessiveness that drives scientists to collect and collate all of these great masses of information, out of the belief that real understanding comes, not from just dicking around talking about things, but from just shutting up and doing the goddamn maths. It should reflect the belief, so common among scientists, but so hard to explain to laypeople, that for those of us who have these obsessive drives, "shutting up and doing the maths" can lead to experiences of beauty at least on par with the highest flights of the poets.

So, what d'ya think, Gentle Readers? Am I as full of shit as I sound to myself? Or do you think it's as interesting, as fascinating, idea for a book as I do? Of course, I'll in all likelihood never write the damn thing, so the question is purely academic, but nevertheless I'm posing it to y'all.

----

In completely unrelated news, I've got a bunch of Spring Break pics, short stories, and Tree write-ups to share with y'all, but the nonexistent gods alone know when I'll actually get around to posting them. As proverbialpulp wrote a little while ago, I suck.

Shutting up and doing the goddamn maths since 1986,
--mark


*Look, I already called myself a "pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag", OK, so you can't say you weren't warned that there'd be sentences like this in this entry.
**Not an actual quote from the book. I just dig on melodrama.
***Of course, the Universe will probably still kill us all in the end (unless we kill ourselves off first). But the point is, that it's far from a foregone conclusion, and anyone who boldly states that X is "forever beyond us" had better be prepared to eat his or her words, no matter how far-out that X may be. Hell, we've already reached the point where we've got more to worry about from ourselves than we do from any other force in the universe. One might even speculate that all of the existentialist and post-modernist nihilism is a reaction to the terrifying prospect, brought on all sudden-like by industrial civilization, of humanity's fundamental POWER. But I'll leave more on that particular piece of middlebrow commentary for another time.
^Which I keep on meaning to re-write. Given my life expectancy (50 more years, and that's assuming no major advances in medical technology - hah!), there's probably a 50/50 chance I'll actually do that someday.
^^I keep calling it just "the artefact" simply because I have no idea what it will actually be. Although I've been heavily inspired by all the sources I named above (Danielewski, Clarke, Borgés, and Lovecraft), I don't want to crib from any of their stuff too much.

According to WDCB (90.9 FM, "All Things Jazz", spewin' its noise out of the College of DuPage), today is Wes Montgomery's birthday. And, as we all know, Wes Montgomery kicks ass. Well, kicked ass. He's been dead for some forty-odd years. But nevertheless!








Anyway, new story installment tomorrow night, and a new Tree of the Week next week. No, seriously!

"No, seriously" since 1986,
--mark

It's begun to snow outside again, a fact for which I am very glad. The return to freezing temperatures the past few days, after the thaw earlier, did not entirely reassure me that we were still in winter's grip. But fresh snow, no matter how little, is reassuring. Still, it would seem that the fabled time of "Deep Winter" is over, and the long, chaotic scramble towards summer has begun. Already, the great masses of air are shifting all around us; a huge, squally wind out of the Nor'east shook through campus on, I believe it was, the thirteenth; the old snow, which had been in place on the ground for weeks or, in some cases, months, has done much melting, revealing spartan mosaics of brown and green turf grass underneath. I can see the buds on the great Elm north of Nutting Hall, and on the silver maples that line Sebago road. Robins have returned, and prance, red-breasted and proud, 'neath the still-barren limbs of the ashes and the grim south facade of the library. Doubtlessly they've been driven back to their winter roosts in Connecticut or Long Island or wherever they go by the 10˚F weather we had the other day. But the point is, the seasons are changing again; now is the time for the Maple farmers and the Avery Coonley School kids to run out and tap their trees for the sweet sugar within. The seasons are changing again.

But I have learned, this winter, at least some part of how to cope with these months of darkness and cold. They are still far from my favorite season; no, they disagree with me on too basic of a biochemical level, and I blame my increased moodiness of the past several weeks in part on the fact that Winter has finally "gotten" to me. But I have learned enough to be sad at winter's end, and to hope for a few more weeks of truly Deep Winter, when the ground is covered with whole feet of snow, and the temperatures reach down below 20˚F, below 10˚F, on a regular, or daily basis. When the clear nights, dominated by either the full moon or Venus, are almost intolerable and lovely.

Anyway, that's about enough maudlin musings for now; I've got to go back to finishing up my rewrites for FES 456 - Tree Pests & Diseases (with Dr. Livingston!)

Almost intolerable since 1986,
--mark

Death And The Prince: A Serial Fairy Tale
Part I:

Once upon a time, there was a prince who lived in a castle in the middle of a dark forest. The castle was ancient, and no one could remember how long it had been there. Not that there were very many people around to remember such things at all; the prince was the last member of his family, and the castle was run by a very small staff of servants. The woods around the castle were inhabited by scattered household of rustics who paid scanty tribute to the prince. In many ways, the prince was poorer than his subjects. There were nights that his dinner table was graced by little more than a few worm-eaten apples and a mug of thin, watery beer. But he knew of no other way of life; of no home other than the castle, with its eroding stone walls and its unmanned turrets, its courtyard overgrown with birch and with blackthorn, its bookshelves rotting with mould, and its wine cellar left unstocked for generations. He knew nothing else, and so had no notion to be disappointed.

One day, the prince was wandering around one of the unused areas of the castle, an area that had collapsed decades or centuries ago and was now little more than a pile of rubble. It was a fine summer day, and the filtered sunlight was coming softly through the overhanging branches, illuminating the tiny creepers and vines which climbed the decayed stonework. He was swinging his stick jauntily and whistling when, all of a sudden, he stopped, and a thoughtful look came over his face. A few dozen feet in front of him, sitting on a rubble pile and slowly gnawing on a piece of bread, was an old man. The man was bald and gaunt, with thin, pale skin drawn tight across his bones. The prince had never seen him before, which was strange, for he knew everyone who lived in the castle and the forest by sight. He approached the stranger, and greeted him with a smile. After all, he was a prince, and it was his duty to be as hospitable and welcoming as possible.

The old man turned his head and responded to the prince. The two soon fell into discussion of the castle and its surrounding forest. The stranger was full of nothing but praise for them - for the patterns in the ivy on the castle walls and for the settling of the winter snows on the broken crenellations and battlements. The prince was glad to hear such effusive praise of his lands, especially from a stranger, and he said so. The old man smiled, and said "It is never a trouble to say good things that are true. Ah, but I can hear in your voice curiosity, as well as thanks. You long to know where I come from, who I am, and what brings me to such an out-of-the-way place as this. But you are too polite to ask. It is touching, for an old man like me, to hear such reverence and duty exercised towards the old forms and customs, now so replaced elsewhere with hot-headed brashness and impetuosity." He shook his head sadly and continued, the prince meanwhile taken aback at the stranger's own sudden brashness. "My name, kind sir prince, is Death, and I have come here from the land of the grey waste where the dead souls abide. I have come here to take my rest; rest from my weary rounds of marshaling the newly dead Gehenna-wards."

Had the prince been shocked by the stranger's brashness before, he was now speechless. He had felt some kinship with the man in their earlier conversation, as if here at last were some soul who understood his own life and could be trusted as confidante and friend. But to find out that the old man was merely some wandering lunatic - it made the prince sudden sad, sad with the loss of a dream still fresh and exciting in his mind. Nevertheless, by training and temperament both the prince was not the sort to let these emotions show for long, and he was soon master of his feelings. At some point in his youth, he had been instructed that the kindest, the noblest path to take with lunatics of the harmless sort is to humor them as much as possible, and let them live their imaginary lives unmolested.

He took this advice now, and so bowed low to the old man, saying "It is an honor to have you in our estate, noble sir. We do not often receive visitors of any sort, let alone ones as illustrious as yourself. I am afraid that we have not the resources to honor your arrival properly, but we will do what we can." In response, the old man said that none of that would be at all necessary, he was here to rest, and that pomp and lavish ceremony would only aggravate him. No, he would make his own arrangements, which response relieved the prince greatly, for despite his silver words, there were limits to his magnanimity.

Death, meanwhile, smiled to himself. He was not in the least fooled by the prince's offers. He knew that the prince believed him to be deluded, a madman. What else could the prince believe?

+++++++++

Believing him to be deluded, a madman, since 1986,
--mark

I'm not sure exactly what it means, but one knows that one has reached a certain critical point in academia when one starts seeing references to certain authors in one's textbooks and going "Oh! That guy! He's so cool!"

So cool since 1986,
--mark

At 10:45 AM Sunday morning, three intrepid urbanites - Susan, Steve (amrikisalaami - he blogs about the Middle East while I blog about the Middle West!), and myself - set out on a miniature road trip out to the Nachusa Grassland in North-Central Illinois, about 20 miles west of Rochelle. This 2800 acre patch of tallgrass prairie and oak savannah has been painstakingly restored by volunteers and professionals of the Nature Conservancy from what few degraded remnants were there twenty years ago.



A thicket of american plums (Prunus americana) blend into the rolling prairie countryside as if they were just one more knobby hill in the series. According to our guides, the shade underneath these thickets of plum shrubs is so dense, and so little grows there, that when a fire passes over the prairie it does little more than singe the edges of the clump, since it can find no fuel underneath them.

( Click here for more breaking news from Illinois. )

Looking forward to returning to Nachusa since 1986,
--mark

As I was sitting here in the Library, procrastinating on studying for finals, I found this horrible, terrible site: The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Generator. Some of my favorite results:





This is our first one, which is mostly just nonsensical. It's pretty innocent, though, and up until the point where Victor & Nancy go video game shopping, it actually seems somewhat plausible. I mean, one can totally see Ms. Drew going to investigate the creepy castle on the edge of town...only to find that she's bitten off more than she can chew! Or something.



But then we get to stuff like this. I swear, the very idea of combining Blue's Clues and Star Wars in the first place sounds like a creepy internet fetish to me.



Y'know, I think this may actually have been a Twilight Zone episode.



...Do I fail if I admit that I think this sounds kinda awesome?



What? See, what really confuses me about this isn't the impossibility of combining a game show with a victorian adventure novel. No, it's the fact that apparently Columbus Day is a plot device now.



...I don't even want to know about this one. Moving on...




Sweet mother of mercy, no!!



RUN FOR YOUR LIFE WHILE THERE'S STILL TIME!

...

Anyway, it's about time to get back to work.

Running for his life while there's still time since 1986,
--mark

316 pages

The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written in the 1890s by the author & painter Robert W. Chambers. It is divided in two halves; the first half is a series of horror stories connected to each other by the idea of a fictional play, "The King in Yellow", the simple reading of which causes insanity; the second half is completely different (and in fact was not included in the original publication of the collection) and deals with the generally romantic misadventures of bohemian artists in Gilded Age Paris.

I checked out this book due to the recommendation of one of my favorite authors, horror maestro H. P. Lovecraft, who cites Chambers' horror stories as one of his influences. I have to admit that, coming from this perspective, The King in Yellow was rather disappointing. Lovecraft's stories are "cosmic horror", based around the idea that humans are utterly insignificant, trapped in a universe where awesome alien forces pursue their incomprehensible goals which may, purely by accident, result in our annihilation. The goal is to produce a sense of awe in the reader, an awe that bridges the gap between the scientific and the mystic. The King in Yellow, though, fundamentally fails at even inducing fear, let alone inspiring awe. Its horror stories have utterly predictable "twist" endings that can frequently be summed up as "...but it turned out that she was DEAD!!!" This is an ending that is unsurprising even in childish ghost stories; for a serious author to use it is frankly embarrassing, and caused me to roll my eyes rather than wet my pants. Really, these "twists" were so silly that I do not feel at all guilty about spoiling them for you, as there's really nothing to spoil. You'll get to these endings and say to yourself "Really, that's it? The creepy, clearly unnatural dude with occult powers is, in fact, a creepy, clearly unnatural dude with occult powers? But...I already know that!"

Furthermore, both the horror stories and the more conventional second half of the book are marred by a mawkish Victorian sentimentality. The stories are filled with beautiful, fragile, and "pure" young women prone to trembling lips and nervous outbursts. They are all placed on a pedestal and treated more like statues than human women - in one of the stories quite literally! This is a trope that is obnoxious even in the hands of the best writers, and here it's just nauseating. It's made even worse by Chambers' repeated attempts to make his characters bohemian, daring, and possibly immoral. I...I'm not actually sure what evidence there is to suggest that any of them are any of these things beyond their own claims. OK, they get drunk a lot, are sometimes rude, and occasionally go on unchaperoned dates with women. Even at the height of Victorian propriety, this can hardly be considered "shocking"; at best it is moderately indecent. And this was written in the 1890s, the age of Oscar Wilde in England and La Moulin Rouge in France, which is clearly the sort of vibe that Chambers is fumblingly striving for, so there's really no excuse for his prudish "immorality".

All of this being said, the stories are not complete failures, and actually have many good points which somewhat balance its many failings. First of all, Chambers can write. His prose is rich and descriptive, full of evocative details. It is very clearly influenced by Poe & the Symbolist poets, and though he is far from being the equal of any of them, he's still a damn fine writer. There is a dreamy, drifting quality in the text which would certainly add to the horror and nightmarish quality of the stories if there actually was any horror to begin with.

There is also the imaginary titular play, which is by far the best feature of the whole book. It supposedly consists of two acts. The first, supposedly, is rather banal, if somewhat disquieting. But the second act...well, I'll let Chambers speak for himself:

"No definite principle had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrines promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in 'The King in Yellow,' all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect."

It's an excellent idea, and a wonderful basis for a horror tale in the best of styles. His treatment of this imaginary book is also admirable. It is left as a vague threat or presence, more often than not sitting in the background and only vaguely connected to the main thread of plot. Knowing full well his own limits, Chambers says little of the actual contents of the play, and never quotes from the terrible second act. He describes the play as involving "Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali..." but what these weird images signify is left suggestively vague. He occasionally pulls quotes from the first act, from which one can, with a bit of detective work, piece together some notions of that act's plot. But of the terrifying second act, there is nothing more than these sparse suggestions. It's a lovely, tantalizing framing, and it makes his failure to properly capitalize on his own brilliant invention all the more disappointing and even tragic.

Properly capitalizing on his own inventions since 1986,
--mark

Part II: Range & Environment

Even today, after all the senseless deforestation of the past century, the tropics are still densely covered with rainforest; and although pristine rainforests are much rarer in the temperate lands, there are still considerable tracts of them, made even more considerable when one counts among their numbers the highly modified but still extraordinarily wet forests of the British Isles and Japan. But in the whole world, there are only three truly Boreal and Austral rainforests. These isolated, maritime regions border on - and in places even cross - the Arctic and Antarctic circles, respectively. There is, of course, the southern coast of Alaska, the home of gigantic Kodiak Island grizzly bears and equally awesome sitka spruces (Picea sitchensis). In the far south, the Magellanic subpolar forests of Chilé and Argentina contain a surprising diversity of evergreen southern beeches (Nothofagus spp.). But the boreal rainforest which concerns us is the Norwegian coastal rainforest. This strange land contains some of the only deciduous boreal rainforest in the world, in the extreme north of that country, up above the arctic circle, where lush forests of birches, aspens, and rowantrees grow. Further south, though, beneath the glaciated mountains which have blocked their northerly spread in these 10,000 long years since the last Ice Age, the forests are dominated by two coniferous species: Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) and, at long last, our Tree for this dark Month, Picea abies.

Upon their drooping, tentacular boughs and their Ionian trunks grows one of the richest lichen faunas in the world, containing many species found nowhere else in the world. Most famous of these lichens is Usnea longissima, the Methuselah's Beard, believed to be the origin of the modern custom of decorating Christmas trees with tinsel. In older forests, these strange symbiotes can grow up to 3m in length! Underneath them, there are rich beds of mosses and ferns covering glacier-scraped rocks of ancient provenance.

But P. abies is by no means limited to this stretch of land! No, it is actually one of the most widespread species of trees in the world. With coastal Norway as one extreme point, it crosses the Scandinavian mountains into Sweden and Finland, and further east and south through the Baltic States, Belarus, and Russia as far west as the Urals, where it begins to integrade with the very closely related siberian spruce, Picea obovata. It is at this opposite extremity of Europe that the species reaches some of its greatest heights. Drinking from the snow-fed rivers coming off the mountains, it can attain heights of 52 m (~170 feet), comparable to the very tallest trees of the eastern United States. In addition to these great Boreal expanses, the species is also found throughout montainous regions further south. The legendary Carpathians, home of half our western horror stories, are covered in this species, as are the Alps. Even further south, it can be found in the mountains of the western Balkans as far as Albania and Macedonia before giving way to the distinct and diverse flora of the Mediterranean lands.

More than this, though, the Norway spruce is one of the most heavily-studied and widely planted trees in the world. In the 1500s, it was introduced to the British Isles, whose wet-temperate climate it adores. More recently, it has been widely planted throughout the colder regions of North America, both as a landscape tree in yards, gardens, and along streets, and as a source of wood and pulp in forest plantations. Here in the U.S., it is the single most common Spruce planted for landscaping. Worldwide, it is perhaps one of the most dominant species in the temperate and boreal Suburban biomes.

One of the most dominant species in YOUR MOM's biome since 1986,
--mark