The tree monster

Suchy Hrud is a strange, mysterious place: two houses on a wide clearing, an ancient roadside shrine, and a lot of puffballs smoking yellow spores. And next to it — two beautiful trees. One is a huge, sprawling linden growing at the edge of open ground. It looks like a clump of several trees; lone lindens like to spread out wide. This tree had time — lots of time. What used to be a branch is now a massive trunk, and there are several of those trunks.

The monster

The other is also a linden, tucked a little deeper into the forest. I think it’s the most interesting tree I’ve ever seen — enormous, knobbly, with a big hollow where a person could hide, and twisted limbs. It looks more like a creature from a bad dream than a familiar linden, and if it ever came to life, I’d rather keep my distance. In the register of nature monuments it’s described as having “a low trunk with huge burls, an irregular, sparse crown — a tree of monstrous shapes.” Monstrous shapes — that fits it perfectly.

Why did the linden turn into a monster? The reasons are probably fairly typical: some damage in the past caused the trunk to rot from the inside — that happens to lindens quite often. The site conditions probably mattered too. What’s interesting, though, is that from inside that rotted trunk, new branches grow — from the interior. It feels like a rather rare phenomenon.

The monster has more than seven meters in circumference, and it’s estimated to be about 400 years old. Maybe it’s not a Great Old One — but it’s definitely not a youngster.

No wonder this tree is not only a protected monument of nature, but also an object under the supervision of the Forest Research Institute from Białowieża. I just hope it’s not about creating a monster in a secret lab — because that would lead to yet another bad superhero movie ;)