“He who does not know the Chilean forest, does not know the planet’  …..Reiterated; because now it might be true.

What had gone before had been an arboriculture, no different from agriculture; pines in place of wheat, log piles in place of wrapped hay; cereals to the salmon feed silo, wood chip to the cellulose factory. It was interesting but it didn’t stir the soul.

Then riding the Carretera Austral south we lose that monotonous monoculture and find Neruda’s forest. 

A dense obscura of Myrtles, many just starting to flower. An inflorescence that requires close inspection to see the intricate detail, only then to find their delicate nectar perfume. Turn another corner and the woods change to beech. The southern beech, and like their northern unrelated namesakes, stand in open woodland, grand specimens that when they die, remain upstanding, bleached sentinels  protruding through the living canopy. Maybe its a change of height, soil or aspect, for we now have cedar stands. On the flat valley floors whole woods of these have been felled to create open pasture land for beef cattle and grazing sheep. Small parcels of green studded with Islands of branch brash and logged trunks; discarded battlefield casualties, bleeding crumbling heartwood, are littered across the floor. Slovenly housekeeping that will be an oasis of bacteria, invertebrates and wood lice.

All of these trees cloak the valley sides rising to a tideline, a contouring tree line, above which the sparse grasses soon give way to rock and ice, through which glacier carved mountains suddenly erupt. Turn another bend, drop down another hillside, cross one more granite bouldered raging torrent and another new snow capped mountain is framed by yet another specimen tree. 

Whilst the trees dominate the green texture, its the verdant verges that add the colours. Plants that I know from a formal northern border grow in profusion in their own endemic garden. Gunnera: that giant spike-stalked impersonator of rhubarb with its umbrellific spreading leaf, creates a barrier and a foil for the choke of fuchsia behind, whilst carpets of yellow Daisy alternate with purple Lupin and magenta Bugloss right beside the road. Find a way through this tangle, find a way into those woods and suddenly you’re in another place.

Sun shafts filter down, highlighting the lichen-bearded trunks and warming the mulch of crumbled leaf litter, a humus that coats the soil-crud of volcanic grit. Then step from the trail, stoop to inspect the under-storey and I start to find many the staples for a Scottish commercial landscaping project or the progenitors for the berry fields of Blair. Pernettya and Achillea, gooseberries and currants. Flora for whose country of provenance I’ve never thought to query, questions I’ve never thought to ask. Despite the obvious fact that centuries-old Scottish plant collector’s surnames predominate in these plant’s bi-nominal names.

I now wonder if that is the question that Neruda was posing. Chilean forests pose more questions than answers…. and for that I’m eternally grateful, because I’m in no hurry to have completed a knowledge of the planet.