The Hallucinations Persist

I remember a sprawling garden in Indonesia where the trees outdid the old gods — and even the taxi drivers of Jakarta — in their outsized lack of inhibition. Lord Ganesha, part elephant and part man, met me at the entrance. He seemed the perfect choice of gatekeeper: the revered Hindu deity, master of wisdom and learning, whose pot-belly contains the cosmos. After paying the admission fee (the equivalent of about twenty-five Canadian cents), I walked past the statue into a humid world aswim with birds and blossoms. My eye fixed on a great gouty upheaval on the riverbank. I took it to be a stretch of particularly gnarled woodland. It wasn’t. It was a single tree: a strangler fig.

According to my guidebook, a strangler fig begins life as a seed that drops from a bird or bat and lodges in the high branches of a tree. As the plant grows, its woody tendrils envelop its host. “Eventually,â€...