Western Red Cedar

Western red cedar layers: its lowest branches bend under their own weight, touch the ground, root where they land and thicken into trunks of their own. Do that for a century and a half and one tree becomes a small colony walking somewhere. Sintra's has been heading toward the lake below Pena Palace for about that long, and forestry students have used it as a teaching example since at least 1916. Strasbourg's is doing the same thing in the Parc de l'Orangerie, which is rare to see in a public park, because ground level branches are usually the first thing a maintenance crew removes. Cork's takes a different shape entirely: limbs running out sideways, each thicker than most full grown trees, and a low fence around it because everyone's first instinct is to climb.