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Editors’ note: After several months of debate we have decided to publish the succeeding text, a reproduction of the final field journals of Dr Peter Lurneman, ScD, former Professor of Investigative Plant Ecology, PhD, HonDSc (Oxon) FRS, in the hopes of laying to rest the controversy surrounding his discovery of the Hemiavi Pseudoschiopsis in the Chaco Boreal Despite occasionally touching on matters personal rather than scientific, these journals, testament to a man of unfailing dedication to empirical observation, deserve a place in the annals of science Dr Lurneman read Natural Sciences at Oxford from 1974 His first research and his PhD were in dendrology, and he is best known for his work on fractal disseverance in the Quercus Copeyensis After retiring in 2006, Lurneman undertook a series of private expeditions that developed his cryptobotanical hypotheses; the papers that followed are more sociological in scope than his earlier work, and address a variety of topics, including the cow-eating trees of Padrame, the Austras Koks and the vegetable lambs of Tartary He is well known in the horticultural community for his attempts to correlate mythological accounts of flora in indigenous literatures with findings in the field, and for his occasionally elastic interpretation of professional ethics while on expedition Early in the following text Lurneman describes an unidentified bite — potentially a new species of Phasmatodea — that may have impaired the lucidity of his later observations These are nonetheless included for their potential interest to scholars of entomology   II The alarbo likely does not exist, but what legend, however disfigured by time and telling, does not have a grain of truth to it? For the Ayoreo people the alarbo is the tree of origin, a tree that speaks, the tree of tongues An organic, self-contained tower of Babel J Wilbert correlates it with the abrexlá, a cousin of the bottle tree, or perhaps the quebracho blanco According to Izoceño Guaraní legend, the quebracho blanco was the world tree that bridged the realms of earth and sky Men would climb it, crossing from earth to sky, and return with honey and fruit, but