The Toppled Tree
Pagodas with bell-shaped roofs on rocky islets washed by a tranquil sea; exotic trees, some bushy,
others fronded leaning over a narrow inlet; a cormorant drying its wings in the light breeze on an
isolated reef. All this portrayed on a piece of porcelain pulled out from the roots of a toppled silky
oak, hand painted with exquisite delicacy in indigo blue some 200 years ago.
Long before the Suez Canal was dug, St Helena Island stood in the heart of the shipping lane for
vessels laden with cargoes from the east, which is how on the wrong side of Africa the tree had
delivered an astonishing piece of art from the kilns of the Orient.
The island is the eroded peak of an undersea Kilimanjaro long since shunted off the mid-Atlantic
ridge by the slow wander of tectonic plates; sea girt, ironbound, and of such a ferocious and
forbidding aspect that Nature fashioned it in isolation, but with glorious peaks of emerald cloud
forest rich in endemics.
And it was one such rare endemic that I was checking on under the fallen branches: the upside-down
golden sail spider, its body fashioned as a triangular ingot of gold. I sit on the trunk in awe of two
beauties: the inert, skilled work of a dead artisan, and the active, skilled work of a living planet. Art
and nature in synchrony; we must strive to save both for the sanity of humanity.