Yet, I never really saw them until now. I am talking about lianas, and they are fascinating. If you don’t believe me, try the following one, try to figure out where it begins and where it ends. It will go up and down, wrap around trees, wrap-around itself, send tendrils down to the ground where they take root. Tangles of small lianas come together and twist around each other to form a rope-like stem. Lianas use trees for support, and step by step, climb upwards until they find a sunny opening where they can send a shoot up through the rainforest canopy and emerge into the direct sunlight. And it doesn’t end there. The main branch of the liana can go on for a kilometer or more.

 One researcher estimates that there are around 2500 species of lianas globally, most of them without names. To name a plant, you need samples of the stem, leaf, fruit, and seed. The stem is easy enough, but until someone invents a drone with an arm that can reach out, grasp, cut, and retrieve the later three samples, there is no easy way of acquiring these details.

Lianas have been called woody vines, yet unlike woody branches, they are usually pretty flexible. They can, however, become rigid when necessary. I know of two places where a liana stretches across a gap. How it managed to cross a 15-meter rainforest gap, only Mother Nature knows. Right in the sunniest part of this natural bridge, a stiff, straight shaft-like stem, no bigger in diameter than my ankle, grows straight up, 10 to 15 meters, until it comes out into the direct sunlight. At the top grow the leaves, flowers, and fruit. Mostly birds eat the fruit and scatter the seeds throughout the jungle, where some of them will germinate. Mammals eat them too, but the vertical stem probably wouldn’t support a mammal the size of a monkey.