Stoneleaf Tree

The Stoneleaf Tree is Tauria's rarest significant plant. It grows only on elevated rocky ground where the soil is thin and the wind constant — conditions that would kill most trees but which the Stoneleaf Tree has adapted to over thousands of years of slow patient growth. Its bark is grey and deeply furrowed, resembling cracked stone, and its broad canopy of leaves — each one leathery, pale-backed, catching light with a metallic quality — provides dense shade beneath which nothing else grows.

The wood is extraordinarily dense and hard, prized for construction that must endure. Inanna has ruled that no Stoneleaf Tree may be felled without her personal permission.

Giliad's Field Note

The oldest Stoneleaf I have measured has a trunk circumference of four arm-spans. The growth rate of this species is slow enough that this individual may have been standing before the Taurus tribe left Earth. I find it difficult to look at it without feeling that I am being observed in return, and found somewhat hasty. — G.