How to be rooted in one place, pt. 1

A tree cannot move in search of food. A tree cannot move to escape a predator.

Nor can it, once it has destroyed one place, move on to another.

Nope, it's stuck.

And yet, it can live for hundreds of years.

Speaking of roots, banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis), like the one in the painting above, are a species of strangler figs. They start out life as an epiphyte on a host tree. Over time, the ficus lets down its aerial prop roots around the stem of the host, eventually strangling it and destroying it all together. That's one way to go about things, I guess.