The Wellwood Tree

The Wonderful Wellwood

Wellwoods are a genus of unusual sunflower trees notable for their unusual growth pattern and extraordinarily long lifespans, sometimes extending for thousands of years. They occur relatively widely across the northern hemisphere.

Most wellwoods spend the first few decades of their lives as relatively normal trees forming the canopy in many old growth forests. In infancy, too small and living in an environment too dark to be very fertile to sustain an ant colony, they defend themselves instead with defensive stinging hairs which contain histamine, producing highly irritating reactions in animals that attempt to feed on them, much like stinging nettles. Their growth is slow, but their seedlings are very tolerant to shade and can spend many years biding their time on the forest floor before they manage to put on enough size to reach the sun. One they have done so, however, their growth shifts dramatically away from adding height to adding girth. They lose the stinging barbs on their foliage once they're beyond the range of grazing herbivores but retain the irritating substances in their sap, which serves to deter feeding by most, though not all, insect pests and serves to discourage ants from neighboring trees from trimming them too substantially.

As soon as the wellwood reaches the canopy, it can reproduce, producing large nuts which are eaten as well as distributed by molodonts and certain birds. It does not produce very large crops, however, until it is much older. By the time a tree is around 150 years old, it has taken on a very characteristic appearance not unlike a water tower. The trunk is more or less a uniform width for most of the tree's height, but tapers dramatically outwards near the top of the tree, with small branches sprouting abundantly from a large round swelling at the top of the trunk. The swollen growth at the top of the tree often appears unstable and surely too heavy to be supported by the trunk, but is in fact hollow. As the tree expanded outward, the tree's dead, hollow core expanded with it - after all, only a thin layer of living tissue along the circumference of the trunk in any tree is alive at any one time. In most trees, the core remains locked inside the living tissue unless the tree is damaged, in which case beneficial fungi can infiltrate the core and begin to break down the dead wood. This actually benefits the tree, as the fungi decompose the dead wood that the tree can no longer use into nutrients it can recycle back into its growth. This is how some oaks on Earth become hollow over time. The wellwood, meanwhile, has specialized specifically to allow similar fungi entry once it reaches a certain size by splitting the top of its trunk, preventing it from producing any further substantial upward growth, and encouraging the colonization of wood-eating fungi which then begin to decompose the exposed core. While the plant's branches spread sideways, the trunk near the top of the tree continues to expand outwards, while the inner wood rots away so that by the time the tree is round 200 years old it has taken on a shape approximately like that of a bird bath, a large wide bowl, hollow in its middle, balanced on a tall pedestal, with branches growing only from the sides and outer edges of the bowl but not the interior. The bowl now serves to collect debris, which is also broken down by the fungi living in the tree's core. The tree begins to develop small feeder roots from the living ring of tissue into the rotting center of what was once its trunk to absorb the nutrients that can now be found there. The bowl is also a natural nest site for large birds of prey, which can bring the tree even more nourishment in the form of their droppings and the leftovers of their food, all of which collect in the bowl and break down. Now receiving substantially more nourishment, the tree produces much larger crops of seeds.

As the tree ages further over another century or so, nourished by countless generations of nesting animals, the bowl stops expanding while the lower trunk widens, first to match the circumference of the bowl and then to surpass it so that the entire tree eventually resembles a volcano. Meanwhile, the fungi that dwell in its core have continued to break down the dead wood found there and have now likely eaten their way far into the heart of the tree, possibly to the soil level, leaving only the ring of living tissue as the tree, the inside of which is lined with a spongy layer of small roots ready to absorb any nourishment that becomes caught within them. The hollow, cylindrical tree now resembles a giant well, collecting wind-blown debris, fallen leaves, and any unfortunate small animal that stumbles into its dark heart and cannot escape and breaking them down into fertile organic matter with the help of symbiotic fungi. As it becomes totally hollow, birds no longer nest on its peak, but it takes on new lodgers - smaller insect-eating birds, climbing molodonts and tribbats which roost in the dark, sheltered interior, depositing their droppings and fertilizing the living fortress around them. The hollowed-out tree is now especially sturdy, supported by its wide girth over a large area of soil and less likely to uproot and topple in high winds due to its reduced weight with the loss of its core, and can now be considered fully mature. It fruits abundantly, collecting substantial food for itself in its well, and will continue to spread slowly outwards for as long as it lives. Ancient specimens more than two thousand years old are not unheard of, which have reached such a size that the diameter of their wells is more than one hundred and fifty feet, so large that light can penetrate into their centers and other plants and trees begin to grow, protected from grazers by the ever-expanding walls of the ancient wellwood and nourished by the debris that accumulates and breaks down inside it. Along the upper edge of the wall, the wellwood produces its leaves on short, stocky branches that shed every few years and never grow to great lengths. The end result produced by a very ancient wellwood is a shape that can be described as a tall wooden wall, topped with short bushes - its own leaves and branches - surrounding a garden in the middle of the woods. The end of the wellwood's lifespan typically comes when the young trees that have taken advantage of the safety and fertility provided by its expanding interior surpass it in height and begin to block it from the sunlight. As it has switched from a vertical to a horizontal growth habit, it has lost a lot of height over the years as the uppermost regions of the "wall" have rotten and been eroded. The branches it retains at this stage of its life, growing from the sides of the "bowl", cannot reach far into the light to compete, and the tree starves, weakens, and eventually dies over many years. The rounded walls of its trunk will remain for several decades after its death, but eventually the fungi will break them down as well, and the wellwood's interior garden, hidden for centuries and now home to enormous, mature canopy trees itself, is revealed. There is a good chance that some of these trees are its offspring, however, which will follow its growth cycle in due time, and thus in another thousand years the garden may very well reform on the same very spot - a cycle sometimes continuing for tens of thousands of years and many generations.

above: The growth of a wellwood over its lifetime.