“I originally wanted to display the trees upright, but when I saw their exposed roots at Tilbury Docks [in London]—having been cleaned by the Takoradi Fire Brigade back at the port in Ghana—I thought they looked like the nerve endings of the planet and really wished others to see them. I don’t imagine anyone in the West has ever seen rainforest roots. Also the trees were found lying on their sides in the forest so in effect they were simply transplanted, almost untouched, from wild African virgin forest to the intense metropolis of the West.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/01/deforestation.