General 
growth and patiently await the fall of some venerable 
forest giant which will give them the light and air which 
they earnestly desire. 
On the ground there may be a fairly close carpet of 
bulbs or ferns, or herbaceous plants. So that even of 
the flowering kinds there are four more or less distinct 
“‘storeys”’ or surfaces of green leaves. 
But in such a jungle as this there are not only flowers, 
but also ferns, mosses, liverworts, fungi, bacteria, and 
alge. It is often the case that every branch or fallen 
trunk is entirely concealed by a lovely living cushion of 
branching feathery mosses mixed with delicate-stemmed 
liverworts. In amongst the moss one sees sometimes 
the flowers of an orchid, or more often the graceful 
rosettes of ferns. 
The latter are common ; sometimes as tree-ferns they 
form part of the arboreal vegetation, but more usually 
they are perched in the fork of some great branch or 
grow in rows along a horizontal one. There are of 
course many other kinds of “epiphytes” (es¢ upon phyte 
plant; this means growing upon another plant instead 
of on the ground). 
Curious barred Bromeliads, many Orchids, Pipers, 
Peperomias and others are particularly partial to this 
sort of existence. 
Nor are alge at all rare, for many parasitic kinds 
grow upon the leaves of trees or on the soil under 
the foliage, or perhaps amongst the mosses on the 
branches which are rapidly decaying and crumbling 
away through the attack of many sorts of fungi and 
bacteria. 
Such a jungle with four distinct and separate foliage 
layers or green leaf-surfaces, with its lianas, epiphytes, 
mosses and the like, is perhaps the culminating and 
highest effort of modern vegetation. The amount of 
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