As the aroma of the tropical night pulled at their dreams, the moon laid an intense light on the waters, making Naia, the youngest of the tribe and a dreamer, climb a tree to try to touch the moon. She didn't succeed. The next day, she and her friends climbed the distant hills to feel with their hands the smoothness of the moon, but again they failed. When they arrived there, the moon was so high that all of them returned to the longhouse feeling disappointed and sad. They believed that if they could touch the moon, or even the stars, they would transform themselves into one of them.
The following night, Naia left the longhouse hoping to fulfill her dream. She took the river trails to stare at the river's waters. There was the full moon, resplendent, immense, quietly reflecting its image on the water's surface. Naia, in her innocence, thought the moon had come to bathe itself in the river and allow her to touch it. Naia dove into the deep waters and there disappeared forever.
The moon, feeling pity for the young lost life, transformed Naia into a giant flower - the Vitória Régia - with an inebriating perfume and petals that spread on the water to receive the full light of the moon.
U.S.A
Has anybody heard of the American chestnut tree? No? Do you
know why?
Because it is all but extinct. A hundred years
ago it was one of the most abundant and useful trees in the Eastern United States. Its story is a genuine tragedy. The sender was just reading about it in Bill Bryson's book "A Walk In The Woods" and have transcribed an excerpt for you that I think
you might find interesting and informative...
With each passing year the character of the American
woods changed perceptibly. But until quite recent
times - painfully recent times - one thing remained
in abundance that preserved the primeval super-Eden
feel of the original forest: the massively graceful
American Chestnut.
There has never been a tree like it. Rising a hundred
feet from the forest floor, its soaring boughs spread
out in a canopy of incomparable lushness, an acre of
leaves per tree, a million or so in all. Though only
half the height of the tallest eastern pines, the
chestnut had a weight and mass and symmetry that put
it in another league. At ground level, a full-sized
tree would be ten feet through its bole, more than
twenty feet around.
I have seen a photograph, taken at the start of this
century, of people picnicking in a grove of chestnuts.
It is a happy Sunday party, all the picnickers in
heavy clothes, the ladies with clasped parasols, the
men with bowler hats and walrus moustaches, all hand-
somely arrayed on a blanket in a clearing, against a
backdrop of steeply slanting shafts of light and trees
of unbelievable grandeur. The people are so tiny, so
preposterously out of scale to the trees around them,
as to make you wonder for a moment if the picture had
been manipulated as a kind of joke. But this is simply
the was it was--the way is was over tens of thousands
of square miles of hill and cove, from the Carolinas
to New England. And it is all gone now.
In 1904, a keeper at the Bronx Zoo in New York
noticed that the zoo's handsome chestnuts had become
covered in small orange cankers of an unfamiliar
type. Within days they began to sicken and die. By
the time scientists identified the source as an
Asian fungus called Endothia parasitica, probably
introduced with a shipment of trees or infected
timber from the Orient, the chestnuts were dead and
the fungus had escaped into the great sprawl of the
Appalachians, where one tree in every four was a
chestnut.
Seldom has a tree been more helpless against an
invader than the American chestnut against Endothia
parasitica. It enters the chestnut effortlessly,
devours the cambium cells, and positions itself for
attack on the next tree before the tree has the
faintest idea, chemically speaking, what hit it. It
spreads by means of spores, which are produced in
the hundreds of millions in each canker. The
mortality rate was 100 percent. In just over
thirty-five years the American chestnut became a
memory. The Appalachians alone lost four billion
trees, a quarter of its cover, in a generation.
Quite a story, isn't it? The only thing standing in the way
of the chestnut's complete extinction is The American Chest-
nut Foundation. They are desperately trying to develop a
blight-resistant breed of the chestnut to reintroduce into
the Appalachians. If you'd like to do some research you can
find a lot more information online. Fascinating stuff. I'm
just sorry I may never get a chance to see an American chest-
nut.
Thanks to Joe at Clean laffs for this information.
VisitThere is something doleful about the whisperingof the white barked Aspen trees that carpet the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It is a sound of sickness and death.
Scientists believe that up and down the mountain chain, the Aspen trees are beginning to vanish. As many as 10% have died or are ailing in parts of Arizona, Colorado and Utah according to the surveys. In parts of Alberta Canada, about 30% of the trees have died in 5 years. The greatest problem is that they are not sure what is affecting the trees. Researchers are focusing on the unusual reproductive system of the Aspen. Instead of distributing seeds, the trees sit upon hugely complex root systems. As older trees die, the roots send up shoots which become saplings, and thes eshoots are not appearing in the areas where the treees are in trouble.
One possiblility could be the presence of a previously undetected fungus. Recent periods of drought in the American west, could be to blame, as well as the eating of the shoots by herds of elk, or human interference from forest fires. Caterpillars are also thought to be responsible.
This article sent in by Sylvia, Dorset England.
