Alice stumbles across the curmudgeonly Caterpillar sitting atop a large mushroom, smoking a hookah. When Alice explains that she no longer knows who she is – for she has changed size so many times since she woke up that morning – his parting advice to her is to eat the mushroom.

“One side (of the mushroom) will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter,” he tells her, before quickly disappearing and leaving Alice to discover, through trial and error, which side is which.

Here, the mushrooms grow in Spittal Pond, a nature reserve on the South Shore of the island which encompasses woodland, mudflats, a salt marsh, and a brackish water pond. The reserve is also the location of the historic site of Jeffrey’s Cave, where an enslaved man hid for almost a month before being re-captured, and Portuguese Rock, which is believed to have been engraved in 1543 by a Portuguese sailor who was shipwrecked on the nearby reefs.

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