Muir Creek Root-Covered Nurse Stump

Muir Creek forest nurse stump

Everything is growing on everything in the richness of the Pacific coastal rain forest. Water is a requirement for life, and there is a lot of water here that enables plants to thrive in a green profusion.

Sometimes trees don't even need to fall before other trees are growing on them. Often ancient old growth trees have large trees growing on their thick, debris-covered branches.

When trees fall, they can become nurse logs, providing nutrients for a new generation of trees. Sometimes the seeds don't wait until dead trees fall.

Serious roots reaching for the forest floor

These photographs show the roots of a Western hemlock growing on a tall stump in the Muir Creek old growth forest. The stump looks like the remains of an old Douglas-fir, and it was probably wind-snapped.

Eventually the stump will decay entirely leaving the hemlock on a cylinder of root stilts 10 meters high.

If the hemlock lives long enough, other trees may grow on its thick, upper branches.

Nurse Stump

Nurse stump in Goldstream Park, Victoria

The rain forest is a rich, green vertical column of rapidly growing life. Here some of the biggest trees in the world thrive in the moderate, wet climate. Year round the growth and the life continues, carpeting everything in a thick, luxuriant moss. Everywhere you look there are things growing on other things.

The nurse stump above is of an ancient Western red-cedar. Hundreds of years old when it died, the wood is so rot-resistant that it could last hundreds of years more as a stump. Before the cedar stump breaks down it may be engulfed by the new cedar growing on it.

Nurse logs, nurse stumps, and abundant epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) - everything is growing on everything in the coastal rain forest.