Extract from the Diary's Introductory Essay
by well-known author and radio broadcaster, Sy Montgomery

In the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, I hung seven stories up a machimango tree, suspended by a rope over black waters where people were fishing for piranhas.

Initially, my climb was a means to an end: I had hoped that by scaling the tree's heights I would attain a vantage point to let me better observe, in the dark water below, the strange, pink river dolphins, which were the subject of a book I was researching. To me, the tree was a tool, like a ladder, on my way to observe my real quarry. However, it seemed that perhaps the tree itself had other plans for me, for soon I was journeying into a leafy world of tyrants, lovers and hunters, a vegetative world of epic struggles and passions.

At first I was so clumsy that I shook with exertion and fear. My weight hung in the grips of a climbing apparatus that mountain climbers use to scale cliffs. Leather loops hugged the tops of my thighs and belly. To climb, I stepped into a noose, straightened the leg, and pulled myself up with my arms, sliding a knot the length of my step up the rope. At first, it seemed my progress was impossibly slow, but I soon lost my impatience and became absorbed in the green spectacle around me.

The machimango was a mecca for other lives. Centipedes curled in the crevices of its bark; snails clung to the undersides of its leaves; a wasp's nest as big as a pumpkin swelled from a branch. A galaxy of epiphytes perched on the taller branches.

Vines, some with leaves shaped like giant human hands, twisted and climbed as if endowed with the muscle and will of thinking beings. Because plants are generally rooted, we forget that they can move, but of course they do: the machimango, sinuous and muscular as an athlete, was proof of that. Its every movement, over many decades, was recorded in the architecture of its woody flesh. The tree I was climbing was itself climbing, for it was a hunter, as all plants are - a hunter of light...

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