Green Mountain

Green Mountain is the peak at the heart of Ascension Island and a strange experiment in making a forest. When Charles Darwin passed in 1836 the island was bare cinder, and on the advice of the botanist Joseph Hooker, the Royal Navy and Kew Gardens later shipped in plants from around the world. Today a cloud forest of bamboo, eucalyptus and ginger crowns the summit, fed by mist from the trade winds, one of the few such forests ever planted by people. The path to the top ends at the Dew Pond, a small pool among the bamboo. Old marine barracks and the farm that fed the garrison stand on the slopes.