Report of an experiment on the flora of Grahtwood
26th of Rain's Hand, 4E200
Last week, while exploring the forests of Valenwood, my attention was turned to a particular trend in the pilgrim trees of Grahtwood that seemed to me to be largely undocumented. Every Graht-Oak I came across had its trunks and larger branches covered in thick layers of reeds, vines, bushes and weeds of more types than I could possibly count.
After pondering on the matter, I decided to climb one of the ever-moving trunks, collect some of that wild plant life, and replant it in the same soil where the home tree grew, just to see if anything interesting would happen. Just an Imperial field researcher's irrational curiosity. Removing the plants from the Oak without killing them proved to be a lot more challenging than I thought. The roots of each weed and reed penetrated deeply in the branches' wooden shell, sucking the tree's vital essence like vegetable vampires. Parasitism among flora, I reckoned. Uncommon in most accountable provinces.
After one week of waking up in the woods and relocating my camp to catch up with the flowing patch of dirt that housed the Oak, I've concluded that the plantlife that covered its trunk and branches is chronically parasitic. It is simply unable to survive with its roots buried in soil. Shortly after the reeds and bushes' displacement, they started degrading fast. Now they smell about as pleasent as a the bottom of a Daedroth that's down with the Knahatten flu.
Notably, however, the Graht-Oak didn't go unspoiled either. In the patch where I collected the plants for testing, now a hole in the layer of green exposing the tree's hard wood, I've found an uncommon amount of vermin and larvae making their home, as well as marks from bird beaks and other degradations that could harm the tree's life quality in the long run. Every other bit of the tree was untainted, protected by the green that grew around it.
It wasn't parasitism after all. It was mutualism.
I suspect that this is part of the reason Y'ffre has established such a strict pact with the locals here. If all plantlife is codependent in this way, cutting down one tree would mean the doom of several other life forms. The Valenwood forests are abundant in trees of countless types. But what could the removal of a mere hundred of them mean to the thousands of less noticeable plants that depend on them? By and large it could be a collapse on this mighty flora.
I leave tomorrow headed for Skyrim with a deeper understanding and a greater respect for the Green Pact and the Bosmer people. Who but them could be so careful with the fact that a forest's life can be as fragile as that of a reed sucking on an oak's fluids to survive?