My Visual Journal #20

in the woods again.

Most forests in my area I visit regularly are - let’s be real - plantations. They are still beautiful (because trees!) and I love to spend time in them, but they are usually mostly mono-cultures and the trees don’t really have a chance to grow old, because the demand for wood is high and so are the piled up logs along the forest paths.

This is why I am always excited when I can visit a forest in a National Park because these are protected areas where human impact is lowered to a minimum and trees are allowed to grow as they please and usually die of “natural causes”.

The forest you see in the photos wasn’t always a protected area. People have been cutting down trees (and growing new ones) there for hundreds of years and have been harvesting tree resin from the pine trees (hence the cuts in the tree bark) until 1990 when the forest became part of a National Park. Since then nature has been mostly left alone to recover. Of course, 34 years is nothing for a forest, but you can already see the difference to a plantation.

There were so many fallen trees there: covered in moss, lichen and tree fungi, with endless bite marks from hungry woodworms and other creatures who were feasting on those dead trees and helping with the decomposition.

Usually, when I see healthy cut-down trees I feel sad. Looking at these dead trees in that forest made me somehow happy.

I also noticed I have never seen so many funny growing trees or trees that touch and have grown into each other. But I will leave that for another edition of “My Visual Journal”.

I hope you enjoyed this one.

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I started “My Visual Journal” as an addition to my regular newsletter to share the photos I have taken during the week on my walks. The overall idea is “more photos, less words”. It will be send out every other week, alternating with my regular newsletter which is about different topics, but mainly about art, photography and the creative process.

Here is the link to past editions of “My Visual Journal”.

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X,

Susanne