Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
Hi, I recently (tonight) went on a hunt to find your fics again because I’d really enjoyed reading them back in like 2016. The thing is, your fic Held in Your Tender Hands made me become a massage therapist. (But like. Actually professional. Not fucking clients.) It’s a career I love so much and I’ve literally been so grateful to you for the past two years that I’ve been an mt for writing that fic. Several of ur fics have touched me in profound ways. Thank you.
THAT
IS
INCREDIBLYAMAZING
I’m so proud of you!!!!! I’m so happy for you!!! I’m so glad you don’t fuck your clients!!!!!!!!!
Oh, I wish you all the best in your career and in life. I really, really do. I’m so delighted by this.
Thank you for sharing this with me, and thank you for opening your heart to my story enough to inspire you.
i don’t know what the ds9 writers were going for here, but having julian flounce around, with a posh attitude, and a pipe constantly in his mouth did not read to me as umm straight.
HEY, WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T THINK ABOUT JULIUS EATON GOING OUT ON HIS LUNCHBREAK TO HAVE A QUEER RENDEZVOUS WITH ELIS GARRICK, AN OBVIOUS TRUMAN CAPOTE OR TENNESSEE WILLIAMS EXPY.
(Also maybe Elis was a war vet as well as a writer and has some scars to prove it. Maybe he was a cynical and torn up and thought no-one could love him and then he met Julian and it all changed)
Trying to decide what colouring style I like/want most for this and I can’t decide so this is kind of a wip.
This illustration was inspired by @almaasi and her amazing fic Little Accomplishments performed expertly by Alexander Siddig and Andrew Robinson ( https://youtu.be/3Tq8zaSObWU). It’s so romantic I’m still reeling.
Not-so-bonus I decided when I was essentially done these outfits should definitely be full length outfits and when i sketched over I was like god fucking damn it. Should have done this at the start:
Today I was listening to Garashir fanwork Little Achievements ( https://youtu.be/3Tq8zaSObWU) by @almaasi and I don’t know if you heard PERFORMED BY ALEXANDER SIDDIG AND ANDREW ROBINSON. It was SO ROMANTIC AND BEAUTIFUL and gave me all the old married couple vibes and I died but came back with a violent need to draw them as such.
SO I was able to join the August 11 Sid City live-stream and watch the lovely garashir script written by @almaasi and OH BOY was it incredible!! I have this one screencap which really says it all. This was a wonderful script and absolutely amazing to watch.
It means so much to me as a young queer person to see the queer narrative that was pushed under the rug in the 90’s being put front and centre in the spotlight by Sid and Andy themselves, not censored by production companies or social stigma. The fact that a very real twenty years later the fan community is recognized and creating content the actors themselves perform and share is just so so wonderfu. I have a lot of feelings about Garak, Bashir, DS9 and this performance. Feel free to break down the door of my DMs and SCREAM with me!!
She’d walked in on something unspeakable. Zira’s morning robe was halfway off one shoulder, trailing on the floor, which was littered with ribbons and hats. Crowley was the one laughing more raucously – he wore a black dress Anathema had forgotten existed, his shoulders bare, his hair a wreck, his face flushed in a most obscene way. His legs were fully exposed and open around Zira, and Zira had a hand against Crowley’s inner thigh. They hadn’t noticed Anathema, deafened by the barks of their own laughing voices, the shift of their bodies and the thumping of the sideboard against the wall as they rocked – and Anathema was about to flee, humiliated to have witnessed such an intimate moment, forbidden romance brought to fruition under her own roof – but upon a second fleeting glance, she realised with a pang of relief they were doing nothing more risqué than tickling.
Please forgive me but I still can’t stop thinking about this scene.
I CLICKED THE ART AND THOUGHT “HEY THAT LOOKS LIKE A SCENE I WROTE ONCE” NOT YET REALISING IT WAS LITERALLY AN ILLUSTRATION OF A SCENE I WROTE ONCE
this is incredible??? Crowley’s lil footsies!!! the way the floorboards kind of remind me of feathers! the cute giggly grins! the way the room actually looks the way I imagined it!!! AMAZING
