On the west coast of Canada, there is a corner of the world where salmon and shellfish make the trees grow, and where up to four metres of rain fall each year: the Great Bear Rainforest. Among the spruces, firs and hemlocks, a 750-year-old western red cedar offers food and shelter to hundreds of species. To follow it is to discover a forest and an ocean that feed each other, and what the felling of old-growth trees costs.
Soft, light and strong, the red cedar does not rot: the chemical compounds it synthesises throughout its life preserve it for decades after it falls.
Across 64,000 km² of British Columbia stretches one of the last temperate forests still intact in the world, part of the Pacific temperate rainforests.Nuxalk legend tells that the valley was created by the Four Carpenters and Alhkw’ntam, when the ocean covered all the land: mussels can still be found at the top of the highest mountains. A spiritual guide, descended from a long line of chiefs, Sheldon Tallio knows he is a child of the cedar: from its trunk the longhouses are built, from its bark baskets are woven and the incense for ceremonies is drawn. “When you hug a tree, it hugs you back.” The carver Alvin Mack carves totem poles and masks from it, “like books for us”. He speaks of the reserve, the violence, the alcohol; he left school, worked in the forest destroying it, then told himself: “enough is enough”. He now passes this knowledge on to the young. Our cedar is 750 years old, nearly 4 metres in diameter and more than 55 metres tall. It is in fact a giant thuja, whose flattened, scale-covered sprays capture light even in the shade, even in winter. In its dense foliage, the red squirrel hides, feeds on its seeds and builds its nest.
In Nuxalk tradition, before Alhkw’ntam created the red cedar, there were no trees on earth; everything, from the salmon to the soil, is connected to it.
A sockeye salmon, a mountain goat: Alvin Mack carves “everything that has fed us since we have been on earth”.
Halfway between leaf and needle, these scales make the cedar a conifer unlike any other, inhabited storey after storey.The trees that grow on the sites of ancient villages are taller, and the archaeologist Isabelle Maurice-Hammond is trying to understand why. With her colleague Josh Vickers, also an archaeologist, she digs into the charcoal-black soil of the old hearths and finds layers of compressed shells: mussels, shellfish, crustaceans, the remains of the ancestors’ meals, sometimes piled several metres deep, some more than 10,000 years old. The rain leaches these shells, and their calcium helps the roots take up phosphorus and nitrogen. On these mounds, the crown of the red cedar does not dry out, and the trees are on average five metres taller than the others. The cedar’s bond with the ocean is older still. It descends from the aquatic plants that hauled themselves onto dry land 450 million years ago, and it drinks water evaporated from the Pacific. The mosses clinging to its branches draw their salts from the sea air: it serves as their support, they hold water and shelter thousands of living beings.
It all began 14,000 years ago with the first human settlements on the Pacific coast; carved gravestones still mark these ancient villages.
The calcium in the shells also improves soil drainage; elsewhere, a dried-out crown is very common in this tree.
Having no stems, mosses and other bryophytes climb towards the sky on “the architect tree”, and gradually give back the moisture they hold.Every year, in their millions, salmon leave the sea and swim up the rivers to the foot of the trees to spawn and die. For seven years, the ecologist Allison Dennert has been counting them, alive and dead, in batches of a hundred, in pools of ten thousand fish. “Salmon are a great gift from the ocean”: they leave small, come back big, and bring back to the land what they have drawn from the open sea. The bears peel them “like an ice-cream cone” and leave the carcasses in the forest. Their nitrogen and phosphorus feed the plants, the birds, the trees, which grow faster and greener: looking at the trees, you can tell whether there are many salmon. But in less than six years, she has seen their numbers fall. To feed on this feast in soil too acidic for worms, the cedar relies on fungi. The biologist Daniel Durall and the ecologist Justine Karst dig up from under the moss a ball of more than a thousand roots, wrapped in filaments: the fungus draws water and nutrients, the tree offers it its sugars.
Allison Dennert counts the salmon: “They’re all pink salmon”, not a single chum that day. After spawning in their native stream, they all die.
When salmon are plentiful, the bear eats only the females’ eggs or the males’ hump: thousands of tonnes of nutrients reach the forest every year.
More than 1,000 roots in this ball no bigger than a pebble; it is on the back of the roots that the mycorrhizal fungi settle, linking the trees to one another.The red cedar is in no hurry. It likes the shade of its fellows and, as they die, continues its race towards the sky; it often lives beyond a thousand years. Once fallen, it takes decades to break down, and the rain eventually returns part of it to the ocean. The biogeochemist Kyra Saint-Pierre checks this at sea every month: storms carry leaves, needles and insects into the rivers, then into the ocean, where the forest’s carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus feed the plankton on which the whales feed. “The link between the forest and the ocean is so strong it’s like a family.” The climate is changing, the rivers are drying up, and the cedar is migrating a few kilometres north each year. But no Canadian law protects old-growth trees from felling, and red cedar wood is much sought after. For the activist Ken Wu, buying it “is like killing a whale for its meat or an elephant for its ivory”. “The reality is that 90% of these giants have been wiped out.”
Six years of data, gathered in the rivers and in the nearby ocean, allowed Kyra Saint-Pierre to prove the link between forest and ocean.
Autumn and winter storms sometimes bring 100 mm of rain a day; the nutrients they carry form one of the foundations of marine food along the coast.
Old-growth cedar is in great demand in Europe, the United States and Japan; yet, for Ken Wu, the wood of young trees has the same properties.“Who would we be if we had no cedar?”Sheldon Tallio, Nuxalk spiritual guide
“L’arbre qui cache la forêt is fascinating. […] The series goes beyond the trees themselves and the forests it depicts, to remind us of the complexity and importance of these ecosystems.”Mònica Planas Callol, Ara (Barcelona)translated from Catalan · July 2026
“Sumptuous images, a dreamlike voice-over, a hypnotic soundtrack […]. Beneath the trees, we marvel at the intertwining of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. […] By celebrating the majesty of the setting, L’arbre qui cache la forêt urges us to preserve it.”Ouest-FranceJune 2024