Botanic Notables: The Immortal Underground Forest

In South Africa's coastal grasslands, to explore a forest is to walk along its canopy—indeed, it's the only way to observe an extraordinary group of so-called underground trees, where only the uppermost leaves and branches are visible. The rest of the tree is submerged below the deep sandy soil, creating a clonal network of underground "forests." By all appearances, the forests are merely low shrubs, which presents the philosophical riddle: if a tree falls and no one can see the forest, what of the forest? In these underground forests, however, the trees don't fall—that is their adaptive brilliance. Tucked away and protected from so many environmental threats, they underground forests are considered all but immortal, with estimated ages of 13,000 years or more.
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