Trees that set their seed grow, bud, flower, leaf and become great living beings will eventually fall, as with everything. But sometimes, and more often than you’d think likely, the tree that falls in the howling storm survives, is reborn as another kind of tree: the phoenix tree. Rising and returning towards the sky, recumbent old trunk lying for decades in the mossy damp woodland floor, fully alive with energy flowing into old canopy boughs and reorientating to transform into new trees.

In most phoenix trees, many of the roots are severed when the tree falls, and those remaining unbroken are bent or twisted at right angles. Despite this tumultuous event, and with the crown of the tree also being in a completely new orientation, somehow the roots manage to continue to function, even sending new roots into the ground, and the flow of water and nutrients to the now grounded crown continues.

The root plate, now at ninety degrees to its original position, feeds the tree along the fallen trunk, the sap flow intact, so that the crown boughs and branches slowly, over many years, grow towards the light in their quest for light, becoming new trees on the old fallen tree.

New rooting positions are formed, typically a few metres from the original rootplate, ending up with sections of horizontal stem (rooting bridges) between these rooting positions. It is hard to imagine the physiological status of a stem joining two functional rootplates. In complex phoenix trees this pattern can be repeated multiple times. In some trees, the original rootplate eventually ceases to function and starts to rot, and eventually severs. This can lead to the strange sight of a healthy living tree with a totally severed trunk. In a few severed trees, sections of stem between different parts of the tree also fail and rot away, leaving independent genetically identical (clonal) phoenix trees.

Many types of trees are capable of falling and rising again, most often oak, birch and alder, hazel, hornbeam, willow, wild apple, rowan, lime, sweet chestnut, horse chestnut and elm. More occasionally the phenomenon takes place in Scots pine, European larch, cherry, holly, aspen, and hawthorn.

Remarkably, trees can walk around the woods, over decades and centuries. The phoenix tree may one day be felled again, by another far distant gale, and if it is lucky, and the energy flows remain working, up will grow another or several trees. Always a few metres from the fallen rootplate, this is how trees can move, in slow centuries-long tree time, around the tumbledown woods. Find a fallen tree and look to see if it is alive, and you’ve found yourself with that most mysterious of trees – the phoenix tree.