Reading this story produced a sense of calm and permanence in a time the turmoil is the order of the day. The trees featured here lived long before we did and and will outlive us by a lot too. On our walks in the evening, we often pass by a playground that hosts a very gnarly old tree in one corner.
Back in my childhood I would have considered it the ideal climbing tree - its begging for children to clamber all over it, given the fortuitous shape and height of the main trunk and branches. The children play in the swing-sets and the slides but have never seen anyone by the tree. I have passed by that tree hundreds of times by now but every time feels special - it has such a special character. You have to wonder how it came to acquire its strange contortions with so many nubs and warts all over.
Researchers still don’t know how different tree species set the angles of their branches — going wide like an oak, or arching like an elm. They don’t know how trees alter those angles during the course of mature growth, as branches sprout from branches sprouted from branches, until some of them finally point down. Trees are both kindred and foreign to us, their various forms so familiar, but their architectural rules still in so many ways opaque.
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