The Monkey Puzzle Tree

The Wonder Files

My writing, it turns out, draws her inspiration from the natural world. From the sphere of the non-human, the fascination with the animal and arboreal. I spend many moments reading facts of wonder; learning about the movements and the magic of the landscape around me, of the creatures within it, and finding those understandings enriching my own life.

The Wonder Files is an extension of that fascination, a gentle call to activism and to care. A weekly love letter that I share with you of a creature or a plant that’s caught my interest in the hope you’ll find them as wild and wonderful as me.

Wonder, I believe is a portal to care. To hold and grow a sense of wonder leads to love, to kindness, to respect and admiration. When we see something with wonder, we are moved to protect it.

Something the world around us could use a little more of.

So here you are, with me, for the Wonder Files.

 I hope you delight in them as much as I do.

If you would rather listen to The Wonder Files, you can do so here.

---

The Monkey Puzzle Tree || Pewen || Araucaria Araucana

My place- my place I call my home- is not defined by land deeds or by fences but by geographic zones.

To the northeast, the ocean known as the Pacific fuses her salty self into my cells.

To the south, the border of Manuka mixed in with planted Poplars delineates a line dividing that which is familiar, my little farm on one side, and a paddock less discovered on the other.

To the northwest, the old volcano, Mopanui, her rocks still scattered on the shoreline, her flanks and sides thick with Fuchsia, Kanuka and the fifty shades of green that define New Zealand native lands.

I work from home and most of all that matters to me resides here, the green belts of more populated zones only half an hour away often unknown and unfamiliar, yet to be discovered jewels, a welcome breath that weave their way through town.

My youngest son, Tommy, is an avid climber. On Saturday’s, he’s been going to a climbing club, run by a partnership of arborists and tree scientists who arrange rainbow ropes within branches like multi coloured beanstalks leading to the heaven zone.

The first tree that I met there made me marvel. A magnificent Oak, her fullness more than worthy of a photo, the likes of which could never hope to catch the splendour she radiated in real life.

I know this is going to sound crazy, I said to Katy, the leader of the climb and this, the first time that we’d met, but I get the sense that this tree really wants to be climbed.

She turned to me, her face lit up, delighted.

I feel that too, she replied. I really feel that too.

I thanked the tree for her generous collaboration, the offering of her steady arms to hold my feisty child. And most Saturday’s since, I am taken on a tree adventure, a journey of leafy discovery outside my geographic zone, to the base of trees I have yet to feel the skin of, and whose messages I’m yet to be shown.

It was on one such excursion I met the Monkey Puzzle Tree, in a park, in the northeast of Dunedin. With Tommy scaling the heights of a massive Macrocarpa, I strolled the garden grounds only to be halted by the trunk of a midsize Monkey Puzzle.

I stood for many moments and just stared. The patterns on her trunk appeared like an etched in meditation, a myriad of eyes ever evolving and increasing as you scanned your way further up the trunk.

At the top, a cluster of spiky leaves all bunched together in conical arrangement, her appearance equally drawing and defensive. And yet the longer I stood near her, I found her very gentle. Watchful. Knowing.  I wanted to learn more.

I wanted to learn more about the Monkey Puzzle tree, the story she carried in her roots.

The wisdom that lay behind her eyes.

I wanted to know everything, and here is what I found.

What’s your favourite dinosaur? Tommy asks.

Diplodocus, I reply, without a second thought.

They seem kind, I continue, an assertion based on little true knowledge or understanding. And for some reason, I just really like their long necks. They’re so…elegant.

Diplodocus for sure, I say again, nodding my head.

My Monkey Puzzle, it turns out, may well have met my elegant Diplodocus. A remnant of the Jurassic era, Araucaria Araucana, the Monkey Puzzle’s official grown up name, and one that I’m prone to mispronounce, is a part of an ancient lineage of Conifers known as living fossils, out surviving dinosaurs, and long enough to have ancestors growing on shores of foreign lands and find me standing at their feet.

I delight in the 200 -million-year-two-degrees-of-separation.

 I think about my Monkey Puzzle friend, connecting me and my Diplodocus.

Scientists believe that their sharp and spiky leaves may have evolved as protection from the hungry mouths of herbivorous dinosaur predation.

I read on further still.

Britannica Online describes them as an evergreen ornamental which on further investigation I find intriguing. Perhaps even insulting. Our colonised viewpoint of the world takes so much out of context; to relegate the Monkey Puzzle to the purely ornamental is to really miss the point.

If we trace back to her homeland, the Monkey Puzzle is native to the foothills of the Andes, to Chile and Argentina. These are regions that experience nature in some of her fiercest forms; the realms of the fire and the volcanic.

Consequently, the Monkey Puzzle evolved to have a thick and protective bark, putting them at an advantage over their less equipped counterparts in the inevitable event of fire sweeping through.

But beyond that, Araucaria Araucana, is a mother, a nurturer, a producer. The Monkey Puzzle is a dioecius tree, meaning that some are male and some are female. The female trees produce large and heavy cones, sometimes as much as eight inches across, containing more than 200 nutrient dense seeds.

In autumn, when natural food sources in the region are still restricted, the Monkey Puzzles feeds the mouths of many, both bird, animal and human. Studies have also shown a relationship between the Monkey Puzzle and the Astral Parakeet, a forest dwelling parrot, who cracks open the cones allowing others around to access all her seeds.

I wonder, on reading the true nature of the Monkey Puzzle as enriching and sustaining, what else we miss by forcing living beings into contexts they aren’t designed to thrive?

What else have we relegated to the realm of ‘ornamental’ when their real truth and purpose exists as anything but?

The indigenous Mapuche people fought to have the tree protected, so important is their existence to both themselves and to their lands. They continue working to rebuild their populations, in the hope that these ancient trees will one day thrive.

And what’s more, the Monkey Puzzle is now endangered, a product of forest logging, of climate change, from farming, invasive species and grazing animals. With a lifespan that can extend to 1200 years, the Monkey Puzzle tree is under threat.

Evolving to outlive dinosaurs but perhaps not outlive humans.

I think back to my Monkey Puzzle friend standing in the park.

In some ways I understand her. A foreigner making her home in different soil.

I remember her and ask,

How do we help each other thrive in situations that are unknown and unfamiliar?

How do we move beyond what we first see, past the ornamental and the obvious, the façade?

How do we help each other make sense of a world we may not be designed for?