A tree does not grow upward. It grows in every direction at once — each cell a universe deciding independently to divide, and the shape we call "tree" is merely the accumulated consensus of ten trillion cellular votes.
Bark is not skin. Bark is the tree's history written in a language of cracks and ridges — each fissure a year of wind, each plateau a season of stillness. To read bark is to read time itself, compressed into texture.
The heartwood at the center is dead. The tree carries its own corpse as its structural core — the strongest part of a living tree is the part that died first. Architecture built on a skeleton of its former self.
Water rises through xylem against gravity, pulled upward by the evaporation of molecules from leaves a hundred feet above. The tree is a fountain that runs on sunlight and the desire of water to become air.
Underground, the roots are speaking. Mycorrhizal networks carry chemical messages between trees — warnings of insects, offers of sugar, negotiations for space. The forest is a city. Each tree is a citizen.