Ithaka

I was flabbergasted when I first found out that I was living near a rain forest.

The Olympic Peninsula, whose mountaintops can be seen from Seattle, is home to the Hoh, Queets and Quinault temperate rain forests. Larger than the state of Massachusetts, the peninsula is almost entirely a National Park and protected wilderness area. The combination of high rainfall and a mild climate produces trees wreathed in mosses and epiphytes. They are mainly conifers, photosynthesizing enthusiastically all year round, with a thriving green understory, and ferns and shrubs below that.

They are also old-growth forests. Not only have they grown untouched for hundreds of years, but trees of all ages exist side by side. Mature trees form a multi-layered canopy; when one dies, light reaches down to encourage younger understory trees; and the dead logs that fall provide nursing ground for seedlings.

Actor Alexandra Hedison, of L-Word fame, is also (you may be surprised to hear) a fine art photographer. She recently staged an exhibition of large-format photographs of these Olympic trees, which she showed in Los Angeles, New York and London. "What seemed so overwhelming to me was the continuous life of the forest, the constant, rain-watered regeneration," she told The New Yorker. "My life was the only finite presence."

She entitled the exhibit Ithaka, after the poem by C.P. Cavafy. Intrigued, I looked it up. It's a meditation on the importance of journey, not just destination, inspired by Odysseus's adventure-filled return from Troy. It's a famous poem, and it gives good advice, but is not particularly profound (Miley Cyrus's latest single makes the same point, minus the Greek mythology). Hedison is making a much more interesting statement than that. Her photographs of trees are imagined as portraits. She encourages you to read them as personalities, subject to the passage of time, interdependent and alive.

Old-growth forest is perpetually under threat from the logging industry, and her exhibition has come at an opportune moment, as environmental concerns move from the margin to the mainstream. She is not anthropomorphizing these trees - far from it. But she is presenting them as worthy of the comparison with us, and deserving of our attention. And that's surely a good start.