In South Africa's coastal grasslands, to explore a forest is to walk along its canopy—indeed, it's the only way to observe an extraordinary group of so-called underground trees, where only the uppermost leaves and branches are visible. The rest of the tree is submerged below the deep sandy soil, creating a clonal network of underground "forests." By all appearances, the forests are merely low shrubs, which presents the philosophical riddle: if a tree falls and no one can see the forest, what of the forest?
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