What Makes the Forest So Captivating?

The forest attracts people through a combination of beauty, sound, and the richness of life it shelters. No one is indifferent to the splendour of a forest. Even people who grew up in treeless country and have never seen a real forest — knowing it only by hearsay, from pictures and descriptions — are not strangers to an appreciation of its beauty. So what is it that makes the forest so compelling?

What does the sound of the forest reveal?

The sound of the forest is one of nature's most wonderful forms of music, and each kind of woodland has its own distinct voice. Anyone who knows the forests recognises the many-voiced murmur of oak groves, the soft, faintly metallic chiming of birch stands, the muffled whistling drone of the sombre taiga, and the chilly rustle of an aspen wood. Listen closely and these sounds become a language of their own.

Why must you know the forest in order to love it?

Love for the forest grows stronger the more you learn about it, because knowledge and beauty reinforce one another. Professor D. N. Kaigorodov, who founded the science of phenology in Russia — the study of how organic life changes through the seasons — expressed this connection between knowledge and affection in his own words:

I came to love the forest passionately once I got to know it more closely, and the more I learn of it the more I love it. It is always so: to love something you must first know it — without knowing, you cannot love.

Affection is indeed strengthened by knowing what you love, and beauty without knowledge is, of course, an incomplete and limited beauty. The most important idea in the scientist's remark is that interest in a subject grows as understanding of it expands.

Why is the forest a complex biological community?

The forest is a highly complex biological community made up of many diverse species of plants and animals, and that complexity is part of its appeal alongside the beauty of its various tree species. To know the forest means to understand the mutual relationships between the organisms within it — the influence of individual species on the whole forest, and of the whole on the species that compose this community.

Understanding the forest also means tracing the history of how it arose and the ways it may change in the future, mastering the means of guiding that change to direct the development of forests in the needed direction, transforming them in people's interests, studying the benefits of the forest, and creating new forests that meet the demands of society. Such is the complexity of the task of understanding the forest!

Who created the science of the forest?

The science of the forest was created predominantly by Russian and Soviet scholars. The study of the forest is the subject of works by leading Russian scientists: V. V. Dokuchaev, G. F. Morozov, G. N. Vysotsky, M. E. Tkachenko, V. N. Sukachev, and many others.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, forestry scientists worked tirelessly despite numerous obstacles and difficulties, studying the patterns of life in the forests, carrying out experiments in afforestation, and step by step developing the science of the forest — the science of how to transform existing forests on a wide scale and create new ones.

The territory of the former Soviet Union holds the largest and most varied forests in the world, accounting for roughly one third of all the planet's forest wealth.

How diverse are the forest massifs?

The largest forest massifs are formed by the taiga, which covers vast areas in Siberia and the northern regions of the European part of the country. The taiga consists mainly of conifers — spruce and the similar fir, as well as larch and Siberian pine, or cedar — with a greater or lesser admixture of birch, aspen, and certain other deciduous trees and shrubs.

In Siberia very large areas are occupied by pure spruce, spruce-fir, and deciduous forests. There is also a great deal of ordinary pine here, covering extensive sandy and boggy tracts, though it grows well to the south of the taiga as well.

South of the coniferous taiga forests of the European part of the country lies a belt of no less interesting broadleaved forests, with the oak as the dominant species and an admixture of maple, ash, and other trees. Between the taiga and the oak groves grow mixed forests of coniferous and deciduous trees. The forests of the Primorye region — the Ussuri taiga — are especially distinctive. In these types of forest, the nature of the north and the south meet.

In these woods you can see the Amur cork tree growing beside pine, yew and Manchurian walnut beside fir and larch, all entwined with actinidia, Chinese magnolia vine, and wild grape. Equally interesting are the forests of the country's southern fringes — for example, the mountain forests of the Altai, the Caucasus, and Crimea, the forests of Talysh along the south-western coast of the Caspian, those of Subcarpathian Ukraine, and others.

Each of these forests has its own features and its own fascinating history of development, and many of them are protected as botanical natural monuments. The forests of the central belt of the European part of the country are especially diverse and rich in different tree species.