A natural monument in Nowe Czarnowo: pines bent at the base at an angle of about 90 degrees, the cause of which is still disputed among several hypotheses.
The Crooked Forest is a natural monument with an area of about 0.33 ha, located near the new estate of the village of Nowe Czarnowo and the Dolna Odra Power Station, in Gryfino County. A group of Scots pines grows here, whose trunks bend horizontally just above the ground and then rise upwards.
According to the Wikipedia entry, more than 50 deformed pines grow here. The trunks are bent at an angle of about 90 degrees from about 20 cm above the ground, and in some the curve reaches a height of 3 m. The total height of the trees is 11-12 m. The pines were planted in the 1930s, probably in 1934. Other studies give a larger number of trees, but this could not be checked on an open website, so here we keep to the data from the entry.
The cause has not been settled, and what follows are only hypotheses. The best known says that the trees were shaped by people, who grew them as so-called krzywulce (curved timber), needed in carpentry or shipbuilding, for example to build furniture, boats or sledges. According to the programme “Galileo”, Professor Kremer believed instead that the saplings were cut at the age of 6-10 years to be used as Christmas trees, and the lower branch that was left continued to grow towards the vertical and in time took on a bent shape.
In 2020 the municipality of Gryfino, the Gryfino Forest District and Polska Grupa Energetyczna began cooperating to revitalise the monument and open it to tourist traffic without interfering with its natural substance. In 2021 the forest district created a replacement area on which 1000 young saplings were planted, intended to be bent artificially. The municipality also issued the first illustrated guide to the Crooked Forest, with a summary of the most popular theses about its origin.
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