Crooked Forest

In a plantation of Scots pines near the village of Nowe Czarnowo, a few kilometres south of Gryfino in north-western Poland, a whole group of trees has grown in the same impossible way. Just above the ground each trunk swings sharply sideways, almost at a right angle, runs nearly horizontal for up to a couple of metres, and then curves back up to rise straight and tall like any other pine. All of them bend in the same direction, to the north, so that walking among them feels like standing in a field of question marks, or in a stand of trees frozen in the middle of a bow.

The grove is small — about a third of a hectare — and sits inside an otherwise ordinary managed forest, which only sharpens the effect: the straight pines around it make the bent ones look deliberate, and they almost certainly are. The trees were planted in the 1930s, probably around 1934, when this land lay in the German province of Pomerania, and how they came to grow like this was never written down. The most widely held explanation is that young saplings were pinned or weighted so that their trunks would form ready-curved timber for furniture, boat hulls or sledge runners, a harvest that the Second World War and the change of borders prevented. Another suggestion is that the young trees were cut back early and side shoots were allowed to take over as leaders. Heavy snow has been proposed too, but nothing supports it, and the uniformity of the curve points to human hands.

The Crooked Forest was declared a protected natural monument in 2006. Light makes a great difference here: low sun in the morning or late afternoon catches the swollen elbows of the trunks and throws their shapes across the needle-covered floor, and a thin cover of snow turns the grove into a drawing in black and white. Local efforts in recent years have also started a new generation of young pines trained into the same curve, so that the oddity should outlive the original trees.

Getting there

The grove lies about 4 km from Gryfino, south of Szczecin, near the Dolna Odra power station at Nowe Czarnowo. From Szczecin the usual route is road 31 south towards Gryfino, then on to Nowe Czarnowo; there is a small car park, from which a short footpath of five to ten minutes leads to the trees, and a red-marked hiking trail passes through the area. The nearest airport is Szczecin–Goleniów (SZZ), about 50 km to the north.