Imagine: bark

One of my favorite things about the garden is tree bark. I love its texture, its color.

I also love the way it hosts mosses, algae, and lichen. It's like a garden itself, in miniature. A landscape all its own.

***

Or maybe it's a colossal storm, a hurricane of wood:

Or a series of canyons, as if mighty ancient rivers once flowed here, hewing a path now dry:

Or perhaps it's geologic strata, a history of the Earth itself:

Could it be mimicking the planet's crust, with tectonic forces pushing up a new Rocky range, or Andes, or even an Everest?

Or a record of a civilization long gone, whose probing wells left the depths devoid of riches, the surface dotted with pits:

I imagine it could be any of those things.

Tree bark, so wonderful.

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