Nothing here
grows alone.
Every plant in the register and every animal seen on the estate, joined by the threads that tie them: who is kin, who feeds whom, who carries whose pollen in the night.
Two hundred plants. Forty-two animals. Nine hundred threads.
A garden is usually shown as a list: one plant, then the next. But nothing in a forest lives on a list. The mango is cousin to the cashew. Five of the howler monkey’s favorite food trees grow here. Six figs each keep their own wasp. The web above draws those ties, one thread at a time, from the research behind every page of this register.
The dots
Each small disc is a species in the register, drawn from its botanical plate. The ringed ones are animals photographed or recorded on the estate. Larger dark rings gather a family, a homeland or a month. Dashed rings are the hidden partners: bats, bees, fig wasps, ants, beetles and moths. The more threads a life holds, the larger it grows.
The threads
- Kin the same botanical family
- Who feeds whom food, nectar, nest trees and the plants caterpillars need
- Hidden partners the pollinators and seed carriers
- Homeland where each grows wild
- In flower together plants that share a flowering month
- Character fruit, medicine, timber, spice
Where the threads come from
Every thread comes from the research behind the register: Kew’s Plants of the World Online, the Guanacaste Conservation Area, university field guides and published diet studies. Each one is labeled.
Garden-area names are left out on purpose. The web shows how the gardens live, not where each tree stands.