Trees have their fights. The big ones give shade to the small ones, which grow quickly then in order to be the owners of their ration of sun, and on spreading the roots under the ground, there are some of them, maybe too much greedy, that hinder the rest in their legitimate determination of nourish themselves
The living forest, Wenceslao Fernández Flores
It´s depressing to see all this
biologically. The Woodlandres again: Hardy´s vision of the beautiful trees
battening on one another, helpless not to profit from their neighbours´ wounds
and death. If the tree close beside me dies, I have that much more light and
air
Iris and the friends, Jhon Bayley
The rocker Silvio used to say:´Everyone does their own thing but me, that do my own thing´. The same is true for plants, as we can see in the two texts of this post: they try to survive in a wild way, even over the heads of their congeners. And yet, they enjoy a great and unjustified reputation compared to the animals´one. In fact, nobody tends to say things like this: ´ man is a fern for men´. And a geranium, for instance, would act like a hyena or a fox if it could. Even plants like bougainvillea or rose bush, well-regarded in Literature, would attack other plants, primarily the same kind´s ones, if their limitations of movement didn´t prevent it
But we have an exception in this benevolent treatment of the language to plants with the verb ´to thrive´, that is what plants do since they are small. So, the next time you find a social climber workmate, don´t use animal analogies to describe him or her, you can just say, for example, ´this workmate is a vine´or ´my boss is a pothos´. In this way you enrich your vocabulary at the same time that you render justice in balancing the fame of animals and plants
