Where are the wildernesses of lore?
The late scholar of curios, W.G. Sebald, wrote wistfully of the high forests of the Dalmatian Coast, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa where fir trees rose like the spires of cathedrals to heights of over 50 meters. They were all gone by Christ's day.
Elsewhere in Europe the old-growth deciduous forests and sprawling wetlands of Germany and Gaul took longer to tame. But tamed they were, to such an extent that a modern traveler going back in time would find the Rhineland landscape of the 16th Century unrecognizable, overrun by flora and fauna best seen now in those little Flemish oil paintings where peasants perched on donkeys pick their way through the riffled darkness of gargantuan primeval wealds.
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