alt Hacker NewsThat sounds awesome! The oddest trees I have come across had big thorns like roses all over the trunk. Kind of hard to see because the trunk is so big, but you'd very quickly notice leaning against it.
That was in a botanical garden in Australia. No idea what they were or how common they are. Blew my mind.
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Ceiba speciosa maybe? That is a weird tree for sure. I grew up where there were wild thorny honeylocust trees. The trunks are spotted with dense clusters of branching thorns, some of which are 8" long and stiff enough to puncture tractor tires. To paraphrase family guy, nature is scary.
I don't know if you are talking about Drunken tree (palo borracho in spanish) but once playing soccer in a field with some of them I ended with around 15 funny parallels cuts. Good old times.
The oddest tree I know of is poplar, which is incredibly common around here and is basically considered junk wood. Turns out, those individual, fast-growing trees are in fact stems of a large underground root system.
One of these trees has 47,000 stems:
> Most agree [...] that Pando encompasses 42.89 hectares (106 acres), weighs an estimated 6,000 metric tons (6,600 short tons) or 13.2 million pounds, and features an estimated 47,000 stems, which die individually and are replaced by genetically identical stems that are sent up from the tree's vast root system, a process known as "suckering". The root system is estimated to be several thousand years old, with habitat modeling suggesting a maximum age of 14,000 years and 16,000 years by the latest (2024) estimate.[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)