Magic trees

In the small book of Catching Infinity, An Evening In Wonderland, I wrote that as a boy, PW used to hide in the hollowed out trunks of dead, thousand -year-old baobab trees and the whole universe was with him in that small magical space.

Now, a photographer called Beth Moon has published a collection of photographs of ancient trees of South Africa and Botswana. You can read the article in the Smothsonian here.

In that article, Carl Taylor, a research associate with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, describes the tree: “When the leaves are off they have this immense trunk and these little stubbly branches, so it looks like somebody pulled them up from the ground and reversed them and the roots are growing aerially.”

Now, isn’t that simply magical?