Knots

With some trees, the knotholes are among the last things to go. You can find them staring up from the ground, eye sockets that never belonged to a skull.

It makes sense that trees would grow their hardest wood around the weakest points in their architecture. This is called the branch collar, & it is woven with wood first from the branch as it overlaps onto the trunk & then from the trunk as it overlaps onto the branch.

Behind the collar, in the parent trunk or limb, the branch core forms: a cone of decay-resistant wood shaped like a spear with the flared base facing outward, keeping the agents of rot at bay long after the rest of the branch has fallen off. This is the knot.

Arborists talk of intergrown & encased knots, loose & sound & pin knots, red & black knots. We who know them only from lumber might imagine hard pills the tree had been unable to dissolve. We would not be wrong. Each time a tree says yes to the sun a no begins to form, firm & sharp & pointed inward.