Crooked Forest

[custard]

http://www.englishwoodlandsforestry.co. ... st-theory/

If you're into timber you might find this interesting. It's certainly an ingenious hypothesis.

 

[Alexam]

A weighty problem and somewhat kinky, but sounds realistic to me.

 

[Racers]

Walking stick trees?

:wink:

Pete

 

[NazNomad]

Bent by man for ship construction.

 

[morturn]

Bent by man for ship construction.

My dad, who was a boat builder, and quite knowledgeable about wooden ship construction also says the same. He told me that the trees on the Licky Hills south of Birmingham had lots of trees that were tied down or bent deliberately

 

[Woody2Shoes]

I' have a 1" dia. hazel stick that someone deliberately tied a knot in some years previously - yielding a walking stick with a 'ring' at the top, where the touching surfaces effectively amalgamated into one.

I have an old apple tree which has the first five feet or so of its main stem running horizontally along the ground before turning vertically (I assume this was caused by wind combined maybe with an over-heavy crop early in its life, rather than any deliberate human intervention). I have seen other similar very old apple trees in a nearby orchard.

You also get interesting spiral shapes when honeysuckle grows in a spiral up a hazel stem. I know that all trees, to a greater or lesser extent, have a tendency to sprout from the bark of a bare stem when there's enough light falling on that part (I assume there are special light sensitive cells, as well as cells that know which way is up/down). Having written that, I've just looked at this -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicormic_shoot

The trees in the top pic do look like they were made that way by human intervention. Boatbuilders in the past would need naturally curved branches e.g. from trees in an open field or the edge of a plantation vs. those grown in dense forest. I wonder if the old "shaw" coppices still visible in Sussex were useful sources of shipbuilding timbers in this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaw_(woodland).

Cheers, W2S

 

[novocaine]

the curve is the easy bit.

the sharp turn isn't. basically it's been partially cut and bent then left for the tree to heal itself before growth returns to normal.
80km from the cost, but next to a canal so ship building is unlikely but not impossible.
pine trees, so not unusual for either boats or walking sticks.
80-100 years old, not many wooden hulled large vessels being made then but plenty of smaller boats still with a wooden keel or risers.

both seem a likely but not ideal reason for it, the idea that it's from a felled tree left to rot seems unlikely though, they aren't in a nice straight line like the article suggests. the usage could easily be for building construction or such like.
which I guess is why nobody really knows why they are that way.

 

[Bm101]

Related.... a bit.
Saw a guy on the net a few years back growing chairs, http://inhabitat.com/pooktre%E2%80%99s- ... ree-chair/ but there is a mob in the UK doing it now that seem far more organised from first impressions. The business model must be interesting to say the least.
Might be of interest if you haven't seen it before. Not sure how practical they are in all honesty but there you go.
[youtube]D0AIqyNuY_M[/youtube]

Website is here: https://fullgrown.co.uk/

Some of the partial cutting and bending of trees/shrubs mentioned in the replies above is and certainly historically was common practice in live hedging just on a smaller scale of course. Wonder if it was for timber framing rather than boat building? Intriguing post Custard.
Cheers
Chris

 

[NazNomad]

I was always impressed with this chair... from BM's link above.

Definitely a work-in-progress project over the course of several years. :-D