The Trees of Bent-Wood Acres

I was out chopping wood in the back forty, and came to a fork in a section of the tree stem I was cutting. Forks are reasonably difficult to hack their way through, so I brought out a hand saw and decided to accomplish the task the new-fangled way. As I was cutting through the wood, dreaming of how it would crackle and pop, how it would heat me on a cool night, what marshmallows would taste like melted over its coals when accomplished correctly—with just the right amount of patience—I noticed the wood was oval-shaped and not round. Wood is supposed to be round, is it not?

I dusted off my brain, and began to rummage through some old neural pathways long forgotten. Suddenly I remembered, this was called "reaction" wood. It's wood that develops on a tree in reaction to stress, usually the consequences of sustained action by wind or water and other various weather conditions. But truly, it could be a reaction to any kind of externally stressing influences. Reaction wood demonstrates that an old adage is incomplete. I'm sure you've heard it—bend like the supple willow, don't break like the solid oak.

Yet reaction wood shows us that all trees bend, even the oak. What they also have in common is the dissimilarity in how they bend, because in their bending they do so differently. The result of this causes their makeup to be significantly different.

What we typically generalize as pines,create "compression" wood. Deciduous trees, whose leaves often turn glorious colors and fall off every autumn, generate "tension" wood. No one knows for certain the reason for the difference, only that it's somehow tied into specific plant hormones that differ between the tree groups. But that's not the real point, which is that different kinds of reaction wood can be manufactured.

Tension wood is usually found on the top of stress points, usually along the upper portion of a fork in the tree. So what pines do is PULL on the limb in order to strengthen it. Compression wood is found on the bottom of the stress point. So what deciduous trees do is PUSH the limb up to strengthen it.

Yet even within the same tree, they sometimes go against their natural propensity. I suspect we can read the story of a tree by studying the different kinds of bending and where each is located. They probably tell of storms and drought, flush and famine. Sometimes they pull inward in reaction to stress. Other times they push against the wind.

Trees may have an inclination for one way over another, yet they mix and match them depending on the situation, or even flip-flop back and forth during a single event. Both ways of producing reaction wood are healthy—just different. It's unreasonable for me to say one way of dealing with a set of circumstance in any particular fashion is better than the other. Just because I have this overwhelming urge for the universe to follow an ordered set of standards, doesn't mean it will. That's good, because cosmos without chaos would be downright boring. So the complete life history of a tree is not told in just whether it bends or breaks. It's also told in how it bends.

And after all, aren't all our human stories told in similar fashion?