Sitka Spruce

Near Lake Quinault in Olympic National Park, the Quinault Big Spruce is a world-record specimen, roughly 58 metres tall and about 18 metres round, a straightforward giant on flat ground beside a resort. A short walk away at Kalaloch, the Tree of Life keeps almost none of the usual shape: an eroding creek has undercut its roots until the trunk hangs suspended over open air, alive and, by recent reports, still losing ground. On the Oregon coast, in Tillamook, wind rather than water has done the shaping: the Octopus Tree is a Sitka spruce whose trunk splits low into several huge limbs that arc out and back down like a candelabra, a form nobody planted and nobody can fully explain.