The Forest Floor — a stop on the Avenue of the Giants.
Look down for a minute, at the sides of the road, because the floor of a redwood forest is its own world and most people drive right past it.
That low carpet of what looks like enormous clover is redwood sorrel, and it has a trick: in the deep shade it spreads its leaves flat to catch every scrap of light, but if a sunbeam lands directly on it, the leaves FOLD DOWN within minutes to avoid being scorched. Watch a patch at the edge of a sunny gap and you can actually see it happen. Around it you'll see sword ferns in great shuttlecocks, and in spring, trillium — three white petals that fade to purple as they age.
And somewhere down there is the banana slug: yellow, sometimes spotted, up to eight inches long, and the unofficial mascot of this coast. Here's the part I love. The slug eats nearly everything on the forest floor — fallen leaves, mushrooms, droppings — and turns it into soil. But it will NOT eat redwood seedlings. It eats the competition and leaves the redwood alone, which means this gaudy little animal has spent a few million years quietly helping the tallest trees on earth win.
Very little grows in the deep shade, which is why the forest feels so open and cathedral-like at ground level. The action is all overhead, and underfoot.
