A strangler fig starts at the top. A bird leaves a seed in the fork of a tall tree, and the seedling lives up there on what collects in the crook, sending roots down the host’s trunk until they reach the ground. Then the roots thicken and graft into one another, a net around the trunk, and above it the fig spreads its own crown. The name says it squeezes its host to death, but some of the people who study it say the squeezing matters less than the shade: the fig simply gets to the light first. When the host dies, its wood rots away inside the net, and if it was soft enough you are left with a hollow lattice standing in the forest, a cylinder of roots in the exact shape of a tree that is no longer there. It is the only portrait of that tree anyone will ever have, and the one who made it is the one who took its light.