Get the facts at Snapple.com The "Valley of Square Trees" in Panama is the only known place in the world where trees have rectangular trucks.
This one comes up on social media pretty often - Poland's "Crooked Forest". It's always cloaked in mystery: "to this day, nobody know how or why the trees grew this way", etc. To folks who are familiar with timber framing or especially boat building, the reason is obvious. Timbers like this would be highly valuable in certain applications due to the "natural knee".
I go "round and round", scrounging for wood and still wind up with mostly cookies, chunks and uglies. Don't know how y'all find that nice straight growing/straight grained wood!!!
Oh I'm no woodsman; I'm more of a bookworm with a keen interest in everything wood. But yes, I'm certain they were trained that way. This was probably a very common technique in the heyday of wooden shipbuilding. Ship's hulls need to be rounded, and hollow. For the timbers needed to support such a shape, there are no joinery or construction techniques that can match the strength of wood grain which naturally curves that way.
