Right now I am standing in the middle of a Miyawaki forest at Kanakakkunnu. It is in the process of becoming a thick forest. We planted the saplings here on 2 January 2019. Today is 10 May 2020. Sixteen months have gone by, and look at the change! This is a cotton tree. Its base is 51 cm thick and it is more than nine metres or 31 feet tall. We used a drone to measure the height. The tree you see there is 53 cm thick, that is more than half a metre in circumference, and more than nine metres tall. Many trees that are more than 20 cm thick stand here.
Three major changes have taken place here. The first is the sheer growth of these trees. The second is the presence of a hive of giant bees in a tree. There are several other small insects and butterflies too. An owl has also been spotted here for a couple of days. Usually they roost on tall trees. Maybe this one felt safe here. So this factor can be considered as a characteristic feature of a forest. The third is that many trees have put out fruits. Such a phenomenon is rare in sixteen months. As we had shown earlier, the Pacific Rosewood has also fruited.
At our Puliyarakonam plot, the Indian Fig tree also fruited in two years. A Miracle fruit tree too. Several small trees have fruited. Most of the fruits will be eaten by birds. The rest will fall on the ground here, and new sprouts will emerge, thus causing the forest to thicken further. Another sight we notice here are fallen trees. The gaps they leave permit new branches or saplings to sprout and grow. A foolish thing we did here was to plant a wild plantain tree in this gap. The problem is that its leaves cover a wide area and do not permit any other plant to come up. The plantain has fruited now, and once it is gone, the space will be reclaimed by other plants. Thus in a year’s time the gap will be covered. This will once again become a patch of forest. This is the manner in which a natural forest grows.