Garth Dutton

The longest running war
in the history of the planet
has been the war
between incredibly ancient conifers
and the much more modern flowering plants.
It has been going on for at least
50 million years.

Conifers are wind-pollinated.
They have to be,
as they were on the land
for millions and millions of years
before insects emerged from the sea.
Flowering plants use insects or birds
for pollination,
and are a vast technical improvement
over conifers.
Conifers have been slowly losing the war
over all this time.
In the present day,
their natural range has been reduced to
swamps, isolated islands, mountain tops,
and the sub-Arctic.
Virtually everywhere
they have had to make the soil
too acidic for flowering plants to grow.
The acidification of the soil
was the last ditch defense
against extinction.

But in South Australia
the war’s over…
And has been for about 20years.

I can recall visiting
an area of re-growth forest
at Kuitpo.
My children called it,
“The place where kangaroos are.”
Pines were growing, just here and there,
in a mixed forest of eucalypt, wattle and casuarina.
In the air was the scent of all the trees in the forest,
including the pines.
The pines seemed to be just ordinary forest trees.
I realised I was standing in a whole new world.
The war was over.

About that time, too,
in National Park, Belair,
pines ‘went invasive’.
I could see in Angolan Afrikaans culture
what they were trying to do,
but I couldn’t translate it into English.
I have only now found the term I needed…
The pines were trying to ’become represented’
in that forest, that’s all.

But why did the war end?
I believe it was due to parrots and cockatoos.
They had discovered how to open pine cones
to extract the nutritious pine seeds,
which became an important part
of their annual diet.
Native trees eventually recognized this,
called off the war,
and invited pine trees to become a full part
of the forest community here.
The pines accepted the offer.
In mixed forests now they no longer
turn the soil acidic.
They have no need to,
as they are no longer under threat.

We have a problem…
How are we going to explain this
to people in the rest of the world?