Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [40]
Blessed with growing conditions that were only rarely less than perfect, the blossoming plants had thrived on the hilltops and hillsides. For reasons unknown, the soil that so willingly nourished florescence proved inhospitable to the larger woody plants. Trees and bushes never became established. Most of the errant seeds that were dropped by birds or bats or dragonites never germinated. Those that did quickly found themselves shouldered aside by the vigorous perennials. Blossoms and leaves expanded in the sun, stealing the light and suffocating any hopeful treelets before they could reach the status of sapling. Layers of accumulated ancient nutrients and just the right amount of vital trace minerals ensured perpetual flowering, and every year rain fell when and where necessary: enough to slake but not to wash soil from tender roots.
Damaging hail and wind were unknown. The climate varied lazily between balmy and temperate, never searing hot or killing cold. There were no frosts and no droughts. Grazing animals did not visit the hills, and those insects that were not overtly beneficial were tolerated. These never swarmed in damaging numbers, never achieved the status of a plague. Bees and wasps, birds and beetles and bats took their turn attending to the matter of pollination. And the flowers throve, layering the gentle hills with exorbitant splashes of stunning color, as if some Titan of aesthetic bent had taken a giant’s brush and palette to the rolling terrain.
In all this kingdom of flowers only one tract did not bloom. In its very center lay a broad, shallow valley where so much moisture accumulated that the soil became a veritable sponge, too loose and uncompacted to support normal root growth. Long ago the little valley had become a bog, which is a swamp without attitude. In its waterlogged reaches grew ferns and liverworts, but none of the noble blooms. A patrician rose would not have been caught out with blight in such surroundings, and gladioli and snapdragon recoiled from the stench of decomposing vegetation and insects. So tenancy of the valley was left to the flowers’ poor cousins, the epiworts and fungi.
Centuries passed, and the flowers were content. On the beneficent hills nothing changed. The summer rains came and were replaced by the winter rains. The sun shifted its arc across the sky but was never less than accommodating. Blossoms opened and closed, petals fell and were replaced, and the empire of color was not challenged.
But while the hills stayed untouched and inviolate, change began to come to the valley. Imperceptible at first, it did not attract notice until the ferns began to die. Soon even the tough fungi started to disappear, vanishing from the shady places and decaying hollows as if abducted. Perhaps some sort of subterranean drain had opened beneath the valley, siphoning off the surplus water that had for so long accumulated there. Or maybe subtle earth movements had compacted the saturated soil so that it no longer held unnecessary rainfall as effortlessly.
The valley was drying up. No, not up—out. It was becoming exactly like the hills that surrounded it. With one exception: Because of all the plant matter that over the centuries had decayed and accumulated in the soggy depression, the soil that resulted was incredibly rich, improbably productive, supremely nourishing. Forever restricted to their ancestral ranges by untenable sandy soils marking their far boundaries, the many varieties of flowering plants that blanketed the hills suddenly found themselves presented with a new phenomenon—room for expansion. This they proceeded to do, sending out shoots and roots and dropping seed at an accelerated rate.
In doing so, they eventually and inevitably bumped up against other flowers from other hillsides attempting to assert their right to the recently reclaimed land. Something new had arrived in the land of the flowers. Something foreign and hitherto unknown.
Competition.
No species needed to move into the valley