Peru: a land of contrast

by Millicent Todd Bingham

Amazing trees yield coloring matter of yellow, red, and blue. Trees cure bites of snakes, the malignant manzanillo infects any one who sleeps beneath it. Then there is the cow-tree of milky sap, the red-wooded blood tree, and those furnishing food for curious animals, which transform it into curious shapes. Beneath the iron-wood, whose sharp edges are hard as steel, crawls the sensitive plant. There are whole forests of cinchona, whose beautiful flowers are forgotten because of the value of the bark. The dead man’s tree grows here, whose stems are sucked by witch-doctors to produce a trance; also the wonderful tree of rain, which Boussingault referred to when he said: “By the light of the moon we could distinctly see drops of water dripping from the branches.” The drier the night the more water it condenses, letting it fall upon the ground beneath. Ponderous leafage overarches great trunks, columns of a giant’s castle, each with its peculiar color. While some are smooth, others are deeply fissured or armed with long spikes. Most of the tree-trunks are indistinguishable for the mass of vines “sculptured” upon them. They cleave to the smooth bark, darting out roots as they ascend. “The green eaves of foliage seem supported by pillars of leaves.”

Tapering ribbons sway to and fro, tangling themselves in the long moss-beards. “Green, fleshy chains” festoon themselves upon the branches, and hang heavily on slender stems. They stretch taut from one tree to another, or rigid, fasten tree-tops to the ground. The whole jungle is knit together. If a supporting tree falls, the confused masses of lianas adhering to it snatch at whatever is nearest for a fresh start. They twist about each other tighter and tighter, gaining always a firmer and firmer hold as they ascend. Far up above, they will weave back and forth a close fabric, spreading out wide roofs of flowers.

Indistinguishable tree from creeper, parasite from supporter, all are clamoring for space and light and air. Those which have struggled through to the top reach toward the scalding sun or alternate cooling deluge, riotous, irrepressible in vigor, radiant with color, distilling intense perfume, drooping with the succulence of their own leaves and stems, breaking with the weight of their over-developed fruit.

Vegetation invades everything. It even shoots out over the water, covering it with lovely forms. Hardly a growing thing can get its impulse directly from the soil. That was long ago preëmpted. There must be other things to grow upon or in. Wherever there is a suspicion of foothold, a new form of life springs up spontaneously, gleaning nourishment from whatever it touches, exuberantly prolific from the start, parasites one and all, living at the expense of some earlier comer.

Even parasites have their own parasitic growth. Parasites flourish as trees self-grafted upon trees. Draperies and tapestries and motionless cascades, this inundation of parasitic life falls back again to the ground in great growing clumps. What indeed is a parasite?

Little rifts of color have collected here and there, concentrated deep in the nooks and crevices of trees, moulded into orchid form. Some are tiny as mosses and grow upon the ground, dewy-looking, little violet-colored flowers. Some lie upon the water, some droop over the edge of precipices, their great mass of fleshy, aerial roots sucking damp nourishment from the air. Certain trees seem destined by nature as orchid gardens. Numberless varieties, each with its peculiar bearing, perch upon the limbs, night-scented blossoms with a spongy texture fringed and fluted in a thousand ways; beautiful monsters of crimson and black, whose queer little phantom faces, with beards of fine hairs, make mouths at you. Hot and moist, the imperceptible odor of each mingles with the mass of other imperceptible odors, oppressive at last by sheer force of numbers.

The habits of orchids, if so they may be called, are amazing; for example: their attraction of insects and means of scattering their pollen about on a moth’s body; their bright color luring day-flyers and their strong odor night-flyers to the same flower; the elastic flaps, a resource of others for a similar end. As Darwin said: “With parts capable of movement and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt really different from sensibility, they seem to us in our ignorance as if modeled by the wildest caprice.”

Whimsical and wayward, restrained by no precedent, an orchid dares defiance in all the properties it possesses, odor, form, and color, so that the line of its descent is sometimes impossible to distinguish. This anarchist of flowers throws out an unexpected leaf or petal wherever it chooses, and if interfered with, refuses even to produce its own blossoms, veering off in independence. The most elegant flower that grows, able to conventionalize even nature herself by lusciously designed leaves—patterns whose suitable background would be courts of kings—riots here alone in “languid magnificence,” merely glanced at by a passing humming-bird.

If a tree or a vine has a little less succulence than its neighbor or a little less vital impulse, nature calmly watches it pounced upon and extinguished. No one “compassionately tries to save the unfit from the consequences of their unfitness.” Having endowed this prolific land, the lavish elements can withdraw and survey unmoved the scattering showers of seeds, that prodigal industry of plants in busily perfecting seeds which will never be given an opportunity to grow. So little chance has a seed that new attempts at life are more secure if supplied by the energy of the parent stem. The elements are not responsible for the death-struggle of vegetation which results. As far as they are concerned, each seed that falls and each little shoot that springs upward would be given an equal chance. But every form being equally favored, its neighbors contest its right to live. Coöperation to make life possible at all, only begins when united force is needed to conquer a common foe. Life here is for viper and vampire as well as for butterfly, and the parasite has an equal chance with the benevolent vine. It is a battlefield where militant nature fights in civil warfare through the ages. Plants once given birth demand the right to make the most of their own particular form of life, fighting for sun, fighting for air, fighting for the right to live. Ironically enough, warfare is fiercest between forms most closely allied. “They interlace, strangle, and devour each other.” Parasitic alliances are possible only between very divergent forms, each benefiting by the use of what the other does not need. Parasites are leapt upon by other parasites; there is strife even among them. Forever fighting with each other, they all suffer equally from hereditary enemies descending from above or creeping up from below, capturing by attack or poisoning by stealth.

Plants not only crowd their neighbors out of the soil, they seem to dispute the air as well. Each begrudges the other a breathing space. The ingenuity of nature is taxed to invent compensations to each for lack of what it has a right to expect as its due. An impenetrable disguise of buttresses is substituted for roots and want of underground space. Air-roots drop from branches. Smaller trees, adapted to the dimness, live in the shade of larger ones. Nature uses every subterfuge, restrained by nothing known as customary. Plants maintain a life whose pertinacity we have no scale for measuring. Each asserts its own individuality and insists upon it with inexhaustible energy. Each is convinced of its own desirability, convinced it was intended to live, proclaiming that intention to the death of its neighbor.