Botanica Atlanta | Landscape Design, Construction & Maintenance

Image: Nicolas Mirguet

For those reading this who walk the woods, you know the surprise of coming across a curved tree in the landscape.

Often a lone bent tree standing in a forest of straight trunks, it is something of a freakshow quality that draws the eye to the crooked, swooping form, but the composition is anything but unpleasant. The forces causing these dramatic bends can vary. Decades back, soils may have shifted or eroded, requiring the trunk to reorient from a tilted root base. Or perhaps another nearby tree, keeling over from natural decline or a sudden storm may have pinned down this tree in its younger years, requiring it to grow around and up. Or, as is often the case, the tree's natural growth pattern may have been disturbed by a meddlesome human visitor early in its life. In all cases though, as the tree recovers, readjusts its aim, and reaches straight for the sunlight above, the trunk traces an elegant curve.

Image: Kilian Schönberger

Not too unlike finding a tree in the forest, I recently stumbled upon a unique series of photographs. In a small stretch of forest in western Poland, one photographer, Kilian Schönberger, has captured an entire regiment of bent trees.

Image: Kilian Schönberger

The pines all bend in the same northern orientation and are roughly the same age. Theories abound as to how exactly this stand of curved trees came to be, but there is no consensus. A reasonable explanation suggests the cause for the arcs was lumber production for ship building, but other hypotheses include freak snowstorms, the scars of World War II, and of course, aliens.

Image: Kilian Schönberger

There is something poetic about the forms captured in each of Schönberger's photos. The compelling perspectives he used and the layered shroud of fog certainly helps, but what is more revealing to me is seeing a whole forest of curves, rather than one isolated specimen.

Like all crooked trees, these pictured appear as living question marks. While the curved trunk lingers as mysterious evidence, the storm has long blown over; the fallen tree has rotted back into the earth; the hiker or logger has long trudged away. We are left with a compelling, sinuous expression of overcoming an obstacle, reminiscent of meandering rivers or the path of one's life.

Image: Kilian Schönberger