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Training Ground 44 didn't start out as the Forest of Death. It used to be unofficially called the Forest-of-Slowly-Dying-Giant-Trees-Hashirama-Randomly-Grew-One-Day until a Senju elder had a stroke of brilliance and commanded their Hatake retainers to take care of it.
(Futako-sama had apparently been ignorant of the difference between a farmer and a gardener, as all vassals evidently looked alike to nobility and Kumade never thought to correct her. She'll find out her mistake soon enough.)
The Mokuton sped up a tree's development but sapped the ground of several year's worth of nutrients in the process, leaving the grounds of what will become Training Ground 44 essentially infertile. The original custodians tried, but well...it's been a few years and the trees are still...lacking.
(At least the battlefields the Shodaime fought in had always been drenched in enough blood and bodies to keep the soil alive and over-saturated with nutrients. The irony is practically tangible enough to taste.)
But, morbidity aside, Kumade had been sick of determining priorities among dealing with sub-par overpricing seed merchants, trimming the Hyuuga courtyards into infuriating perfection (damn their Byakugan and audacity to blackmail), fixing every decorative tree and shrubbery around Konohagakure, and covering every training-related crack, Katon-afflicted scorch mark and Doton-ground rearrangement—can't these shinobi clean after their own public messes, yada yada yada—when the orders came.
He was exhausted. So, so very weary, that he allowed any unoccupied clan members free rein in dealing with their newest project.
And young, brilliant three-year old Kangai, a sample of his own cultivated breed of sparking—why is it sparking?!—slime-mold held in hand, called first dibs in appointing himself head curator of the-Forest-of-Hashirama's-Lack-of-Planning, his ever present companion, the five year-old Hoshikusa (with both arms occupied by a medium-sized sour blue watermelon) not far behind him.
(And okay, Kumade can admit he probably has a bit of a bias against the Shodaime, and possibly every other Mokuton user in existence. Which is mostly because the whole lot of them happened to be bumbling idiots. Annoyingly loud, overtly sensitive, sunny and charismatic idiots. Every single one of them with varying degrees of clumsy sunniness and idiocy. It must be characteristic of the Mokuton and not genetic of the entire Senju bloodline. It must be, should be the former, because the latter being true is too horrifying to contemplate.)
And, that said, maybe Kumade had been too hasty not to put an age limit, wariness rising as he listened to the two Hatake children make plans involving a more...terrifying and exotic ecosystem.
Plans involving saturating the site in enough Hatake Famine-grade Plant Food instead of the sub-par civilian Tree Food kind to not just sustain but supercharge the giant Hashirama-Loves-You-All trees, which will essentially produce the oxygen needed to supply larger and more dangerous organisms like bears and tigers and monitor lizards, but arthropods will apparently be the best and most adaptable candidates—and there goes Kangai's carnivorous toothed fungi obsession, again.
What is it with giant-sized, man-eating, tiger-striped mushrooms that the boy loves so much?
And let's rewind that train of thought into an organized list:
One: Monstrous biota to fit monstrous trees.
Two: Giant creepy-crawly insects...
Kumade's brain decided to pull the brakes at that part.
He swallowed a whimper, pinched his nose and slowly counted backwards, willing his entomophobia to curl up in some forgotten corner and die die die.
Those boys are going to be the death of him.
Then, Kumade imagined the blackmailer Taiyo Hyuuga's stupidly smug face being punted right into the Future-Forest-of-Certain-Doom, and he changed his mind and forced himself to calmly walk away.
Playing ignorance is going to be bliss.