Last Sunday’s America’s Funniest Home Videos had a clip of some people hanging from a branch of a tree over a river. And guess what: the branch breaks and they fall in the river. But the trees in this brief clip were strikingly gnarled, so much so that they looked like they would be an artist’s creation more than real trees. Says I to myself, I must find such a picturesque tree for my own home, to keep the weeping willow company.
What are the notably gnarled species of trees in North America? The trees I saw in the clip were not pines, so let’s exclude those.
Aren’t hornbeams exceedingly strong, though? If the folks fell into the river, that might suggest it was a weaker wood.
And is there any indication of where the video might have been from? I can’t recall if the announce the videos as “By Bob Smith, of Kalamazoo, Michigan”, or the like.
I saw the AFV clip. The, multi branched, limb looked dead to me. I think it may have been a live oak tree. There were two large adult men swinging on a rope attached to the limb and trying to swing out over a creek.
No, unless the video is one of the three finalists on that show, they don’t tell who made it, and unless it wins the $10,000 prize, we don’t learn where it was made, either. This is a fast-paced show with dozens of clips.
Some of the gnarliest trees I’ve ever seen are the coast live oaks at Los Osos Bay Reserve, near San Luis Obispo–like this and this. However, my all-time favorite is this one.
I concur about the Coast Live Oaks. Robert Louis Stevenson thought the trees around Monterey were woods for theives and murderers to crawl. People not accustomed to the trees find them sinister and strange (they look very snakelike nad tend to spread out rather than climb (except on rich soils where they seem to grow upward). Even if they fall partly over, they’ll simply keep snaking across the ground.
In my experience Hornbeam is much like Birch, cut and dried they’re very hard, strong woods. Alive it’s a different story, they both like wet conditions, the Hornbeams I know seem to prefer the banks of rivers. All that moisture makes the branches/trunks easier to bend, and under sufficient load, break. I’ve seen 25’ Birches bent down to the ground with a heavy snow load.
