Crooked Forests

A forest of about 400 pine trees in Western Poland all grow with a 90 degree northward  bend at the base of their trunks.  The patch, within a a larger forest of straight growing pine trees, was planted in approximately 1930, and it is assumed that their peculiar growth habit is due to some mechanical intervention, though the reason behind it is unknown.  A commenter on the original post (at discoverynews) said he was taught to do this by his grandfather, with the intent of making saplings grow ready-shaped for canes.  So perhaps this was a cane forest interrupted by World War II.

The twisted trees of Saskatchewan Canada are more mysterious. The grove of deformed aspens is on private land, and though the Friends of the Crooked Bush speculate that the trees could be due to meteorites or even UFO's, a more likely explanation seems a rare genetic mutation such as that causing contortion in the Henry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta').  When vegetatively propagated and grown at locations in Manitoba, the Saskatchewan aspens retain their crookedness.

But my favorite crooked tree story is this one from my home state of Oklahoma, and the Land Run town of Shawnee (which oddly enough also happens to be the birthplace of Brad Pitt):

"In a whimsical moment" Shawnee residents Frank Witherspoon and Gule Rinneger went down to the banks of the North Canadian river, dug up two elm saplings, and brought them back to town in a one-horse hack.   Witherspoon decided that he would form an arch of the two trees by tying them together in front of his newly built house.  Witnesses said that the plants were more than six feet tall, and that he tied them together as high as he could reach, using ropes and burlap to bind them.  In spite of the mischief of neighborhood children, who used to cut the bindings, he was successful in his efforts to grow the trees into a knot.[source]

They grew more closely attached through the years, bending together with age. In 1930, their picture appeared in the syndicated "Believe It or Not" column of Robert Ripley, and again in the book "Nature Woodland Wonders" in 1945.  The Oklahoma state highway commission included them in its booklet, "New Thrills Ahead." at about the same time; they were by that time just a few feet away from State Highway 270 and a regular stop for travelers.  I can't find any information on when they went at last; but I'm sure they went together. 

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house. 

1960s Landscapes in the Help

Nearly a year ago, now, I got a request through the blog for more information about the early 1960s landscape, about which little (so far!) has been written. It was for a film, for the exterior setting of a ranch house in the American South in which lived a couple with one young child and one on the way and who were aspiring to social status. This was the house:

The foundation plantings are right but they would have been new and raw in 1960; small and tentative, as aspirational as the couple in the house. One of the most telling features of the landscape is actually the pole light; its white cap is just visible in the above photo near the front door.  Lighting not just the house but the yard was definitely a luxury, and became a tell-tale sign of class in the 1950s. Watch for it in the movie; the set designers appropriately show the light emphasized with garish annuals around its base.

I also recommended some newly planted rose bushes surrounded by box...Jacqueline Kennedy had renovated and replanted the White House Rose Garden in the early 1960s  and her influence on American women was pervasive.  You can see the rose garden in the first part of the Kennedy home movie below.   But that recommendation didn't make it into the movie. 



(for a look at the White House gardens over time, see the lovely series of historical photographs of the Rose Garden (the West garden) and the East Garden at the White House museum.) 

So I sent this advice, and promptly forgot about it. But the movie has just been released…it was The Help, about the struggles of the black women who worked in the households of well-to-do whites in Jim Crow Mississippi.

I watched it today in a movie theatre in the most prosperous square miles of Nashville Tennessee, right across the parking lot from the offices of the Junior League. When you see the movie you’ll understand what that means. The mid-day crowd of ladies-who-lunch was of a social type peculiar to the American South; of a piece with the women depicted in the film except with sleek bobs instead of 1960s bouffants. The strands of pearls were still in evidence, and the yard lights still glow over their front sidewalks. But on this day their laughter was at times too loud to have come from a comfortable place.