The Crooked Forest

The Crooked Forest is a small forest of pine trees that grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks. This pine trees forest located outside Nowe Czarnowo, West Pomerania, Poland. With their trunks all bent the northward, these trees look like something straight out of one of the more uncomfortable fairy tales. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees is a mystery.

This grove of approximately 400 curved pines was planted around 1930. It is generally believed that some form of human tool or technique was used to make the trees grow this way, but the method and motive are not currently known.

These are probably Pitch Pine trees that were planted and grown in this shape for the purpose of making bent-wood furniture, the ribs for boat hulls or yokes for ox-drawn plows. Initially they would have been bent nearly horizontal in a northerly direction to allow maximum sunlight to help with the growth. Pitch pine is a very durable wood and suitable for boats used in salt or fresh water because of its resistance to rot and decay. These were most probably planted before the war and then abandoned as the wooden boat building industry was forced into early demise.