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A strangler seed dropped by a bird in a cranny of oak bark will sprout and send down fine brown root
hairs that dangle and lengthen until they touch the ground. There they dangle and lengthen until
they touch the ground. There they grip and thicken and become buttresses. Over the small hard oak
leaves the thick dark-green oily strangler's leaves lift and shut out the sun. Its long columnar
trunks and octopus roots wrap as if they were melted and poured around the parent trunk, flowing
upward and downward in wooden nets and baskets and flutings and enlacings, until later the strangler
will stand like a cathedral about a fragment of tree it has killed, crowning leaves and vast branches
supported by columns and vaultings and pilings of its bowery roots.
(p.33-34, Marjory Stoneman Douglas.)
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