Limber Pine
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The limber pine is (unsurprising, given its name) a tree that bends. On a warm day, you can tie a knot in the tips of its branches and then undo it with no harm done. This is a tree with wisdom tucked between the petals of its pine cones and the forks between its branches.
I learned this and more on a tour of trees at a “ski with an arborist” event at a nearby mountain. Intrigued, I showed up at the designated lift at the designated time and stood in that awkward waiting-for-someone-don’t-know-who stance. I was about to bail when the man who had stood next to me for the last ten minutes asked, “are you here for ski with an arborist?” “Yes,” I said, a little too enthusiastically because I was now released from the ridiculous worry I had been stood up. “I’m the arborist,” he replied. We chatted while waiting for more folks to arrive but they didn’t, so it was to be a private tour.
“Apart from its contortionism, it can exist in the hardest places to grow because its seeds are dispersed by one type of bird”
He taught me the difference between sub-alpine firs and Engelmann spruce, the lifecycle of pine cones and how they differ between species. I learned that there was one section of this particular mountain (Solitude, in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah), that had almost all the species in one small triangular space. When we got to the limber pine, I kept having questions despite increasingly cold toes.
Enough about me, back to the tree. Apart from its contortionism, it can exist in the hardest places to grow because its seeds are dispersed by one type of bird – the Clark’s Nutcracker. They cache seeds all all sorts of places, including rock crevices, to protect them from theft. Although they have remarkable spatial awareness, they won’t find them all again, and that’s where the tree’s story begins.
The seeds that don’t end up down the nutcracker’s gullet are left, and most don’t end up doing anything. But a few happen to have landed in a place just warm enough, with just enough space to put out roots, in just the right time for a rainstorm to provide a pool of water - to begin to grow. When they do, those roots end up making their own soil by displacing granules of rock as they slowly expand. These small pockets are sized such that water can enter, and when water’s in the picture erosion continues apace. The freeze-thaw cycle is nothing if not efficient at chipping away at those cliffs one granule at a time. There you have it, a micro-environment in which a tree begins to take shape.
“So being bendy can mean survival in the strangest, oddest, and most difficult of circumstances. Bowing to and with the storm is the practice for hovering over that cliff and then snapping back to where you were.”
So it’s a well named tree. It’s limber both in its physical form and its adaptability. It’s the type of tree up on the cliffs where the others can’t quite make it. Its branches bow down over the edge during wind and snowstorms and then they pop back up, ready to take on another load of snow
That flexibility helps it tremendously during the deepest of snow days. The snow bends the branches and they give until the angle is too steep and the load is too heavy. Then, the snow slides off, sometimes with an assist from the wind. Once the load is released, the branch returns to its original position without fanfare.
So being bendy can mean survival in the strangest, oddest, and most difficult of circumstances. Bowing to and with the storm is the practice for hovering over that cliff and then snapping back to where you were.
To look out over the difficult and then return to yourself. To bow and touch the earth and then come back. I would like to see it like that because it means that I don’t have to ascribe to strength as stiffness. The limber pine says that rigidity is the weakness.
Because look, it says. Look at what I can do with all this flexibility. Look at where I can grow.
Look at what I can carry and still be myself.