{More in depth writings and resources available to guide you through the herbal year in my self-published Lunica Planner.}
In the old tales, the forest is challenge the hero must overcome. It puts forth obstacles, but also promises of riches if traversed successfully. It makes the hero rethink their own motives and the greater nature of things. The forest becomes a character in the story, twisting and shaping the experience of the hero.
Even in real life, we don’t often consider that forests are not one big homogenous expanse or entity, but more of a tapestry of tree species, forestry types, and stories weaving in and out of each other. They ebb and flow, creating a wholly unique fingerprint in each place they touch.
They are also changing, have been changing, as surely as the seasons. The forest that I call home is not the same as it was before it was logged, but the essence of that original forest is still here. According to Michigan’s vegetation circa 1800 map, it was on the border between a white pine-hemlock forest and a hardwood swamp, a neatly knit seam made up of various threads.
Even if the forest is not exactly the same as it once was, the swamp is still here, the mosquitoes don’t let me forget that fact. White and red oaks signature of a hardwood swamp dot the land. The white pine is still here, some huge, saved from the saw.
But the hemlocks are gone, and more maples and red pine have snuck in. It’s a forest still in its growing pains stage. The pioneer species like the aspen and birch are dying off, the slower growing hardwoods are fighting for spots of sunlight under the canopy, its personality is shaped many times over.
This unique intersection of hardwood swamp and white pine-hemlock forest types also create an interesting growing space for understory plants. In the drier spaces, bracken ferns colonize the floor completely in some places, sometimes allowing space for wintergreen, blueberries, bunchberries, and wild strawberries to grow. The shady swamp areas are home to iris and trillium, while swamp milkweed, boneset, gentians, and cattails grow in the more open wetland areas.
It is a forest on the edge, a forest that is constantly pushing and pulling against its boundaries. When I was younger, I didn’t notice the feelings that arise when you step into these different types of forests.
The smell of cedar forests will always remind me of my childhood, stretching the days into infinity at my grandparents cottage up north.
Or how the old growth forest of the Pigeon River Country felt like it was breathing as I walked its paths. Some places were cooler, others noticeably warmer, like the land was inhaling and exhaling, the feeling of being completely engulfed in its rhythms.
The forest of the Porcupine Mountains in the dead of winter helped me grasp the enormity and endlessness of wild spaces as the quiet snow-covered forest hugged the ancient banks of Lake Superior, two primal forces in all their icy ferocity.
I realized how alive magic truly is as I walked through the golden aspen forests of the Rocky Mountains in autumn. Their leaves flutter like no other kind of tree, little fairy wings set fire by sunlight.
Even the tiny piece of forest in the middle of the city in which I group up taught me that wildness can thrive anywhere. Sometimes, it’s these little pockets of trees and greenery that are the most wild, the most precious, defying the confines of concrete.
Of course forests weren’t always so diverse. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth was just rock. Ever so slowly the mosses covered the hard surface like a mother tucking in their child. Plants eventually began growing heavenwards, higher and higher until the first forest was born.
This is a story of that first forest that gave birth to all others and so much more.
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