World Rainforest Day

Everybody has heard of Tropical Rainforests and their wondrous biodiversity but not so many have come across the term Temperate Rainforest. If the Tropical rainforest is a hot steamy flamboyant entity, its Temperate cousin is cool, misty and understated, the difference maybe between a flamenco dancer, all layered skirts, colour and clicking castanets  and a more arty interpretive one, heavily into green scarves. Both are uniquely beautiful, and both are being danced out of their existence by their human partners.

Once, the whole of the Western seaboard of the British Isles grew this temperate green cloak with trees whose branches were more like clothes horses for the mosses lichens and ferns that clung sprawled and hung from them. Beneath, deep pillows, and eiderdowns of mosses and liverworts inhaled rain and breathed out water vapours until the forest canopy looked as if it was smoking. How many million gallons would this mattress have held, creating its own damp microclimate and releasing its excess into streams in a slow seepage. Now only a fragmented 1% survives, fragile and beleaguered with air pollution that poisons its fluttering lichen scarves until the branches are laid bare.  Pulmonaria, the lung lichens, are the first to go with their broad wet lobes, looking so like our own wet lungs….

But still a remnant holds out in the deep valleys of the Central Lakes and today, being ‘World Rainforest Day’ (and the skies appropriately tipping it down), I was happy to be at Rheged again, joining in a celebration of new funding for rainforest restoration and finding out about some of the other new woodland creation works springing up across the area.