Andy and I became completely fascinated by "nurse logs." We'd seen them before even in the old-growth forests here on the island. We'd also seen huge trees that had fallen over or been cut down and we wondered why nobody was using that perfectly good firewood. What we learned was that felled trees serve the forest as the basis of new life. Animals make their homes in them, mosses grow, and eventually new trees form on top of them. The Grove of the Patriarches was, in fact, a forest that grew up upon a forest that had perished long before it began growing. So we were looking at thousands of years of growth that came from thousands of other years of growth.