Witness Tree -- Thick limbs, black bark in a crackled pattern, large boles, shiny black sap. Broad waxy lavender flowers, small teardrop-shaped blackish-green leaves.
Annis/Witch tree. These trees have broad, twisted trunks, fingerlike branches, spearhead-shaped green-black leaves and tiny blood-red berries. The berries and leaves are poisonous. Witch trees flower with tiny white clusters of blossoms at the base of each leaf. Anything made of the wood will attract mischievious spirits. Potent poisons can be brewed from the leaves and berries, and in diluted form these can also be used to kill internal parasites. These trees are common and survive anywhere that normal trees live, from coastal to sub-arctic zones.
Blood appletree. Dark-barked, gnarled apple-trees that seem generally normal until they produce flowers and fruit. The leaves are a darkish green, and the flowers are quite red. The apples they produce have firm, shiny red skins and white insides except for around the core, where the fruit shades through pink and into red and becomes somewhat sticky, though still sweet. The core sections are pale off-white and quite stiff, almost hard; the seeds within are slightly ruddy. Native to and only growing in Haaraka.
Cholit tree. Small, stunted and gnarled trees with muddy brown-green forked leaves, twisting branches and small hanging fruits. The fruits have smooth, edible red-orange skins and thousands of tiny edible white seeds in the sweet pulp in the middle. Flowers in the spring are huge and red-orange. The wood is soft and good for carving. Cholit trees grow in the tropical regions of Yezadra and further south into Zhangi-Uru.
Cyrak/Banshee tree. Slim, willowy white-barked trees, rarely more than fifteen feet in height, with four-parted pale green leaves. In actuality, they are carnivorous semi-intelligent creatures. When life forms approach, they grab with their branches and cut at the entrapped creature with sharp-edged leaves. When cut, the tree shrieks and bleeds red-black sap. It must be burned out to the roots, or it will regenerate. Cyrak trees are more intelligent cousins of the Banshee trees, and can walk very slowly in marshy areas by pulling roots out of the ground. Both Banshee and Cyrak trees are found only in swamps, usually solitary or in clusters of one Cyrak and several Banshee trees.
Drassil tree (Tree of Ydgys). Massive, magically-bred and shaped hardwood trees known to easily reach thirty feet in diameter and two hundred fifty feet tall. Their leaves are more like fronds, generally a foot long and five inches wide, and are deep green but quite translucent when held to the light. Their root systems plunge a good hundred to a hundred fifty feet underground, and tend to slip through cracks in rocks and break them further as they grow. Thus, they have the tendency to collapse tunnels or caverns beneath them. They are highly malleable to elven magics, and serve as homes to the elves of the Forest of Mists, the western Forest of Night, and the deep Border Forest. Their bark is several inches thick on the trunk, and they start to branch a quarter of the way up but do so sporadically until the top tenth. Individual structure depends on the resident elves, but can include thick glassy resin, rainwater reservoirs and internal lichen and plant growth. They do not seed themselves.
Fern tree. Many varieties of this tree are found in swampy areas and around lakes and river deltas. Solid wood trunk with no branches until the crown, where they spread into thin twigs covered with fern-like leaves and spore-clusters.
Rattle tree. Small seed-tree that grows big woody spheres covered in trumpet-shaped orange flowers. Once pollinated, the flowers drop off and the inner fibers of the spheres dry out and rot, letting the seeds fall through the holes where the flowers had been when the wind shakes them. Thin dark-green leaves in star-shaped clusters. Found throughout Illane, Padras and Jernizan, and some parts of Yezadra and Hjaltar.
Grey Soren. A large tree with a stocky trunk, the soren are very straight and reach up to a hundred fifty feet high with a twenty foot girth. They have smooth, stone-grey bark and few low branches, but in the higher reaches their thick limbs branch out repeatedly to create wide shady canopies for great distances. The leaves are multitudinous and about two inches long, light green and spearhead-shaped. When new, the leafbuds are covered in a greyish fuzz, and in this state they can be picked from young trees and boiled as sprouts. The soren also produces round nuts likewise covered in the silvery fuzz at first; the soren nutmeat is white and surrounded by a papery tan membrane underneath a pliable but tough shell. Soren nuts are bitter until cooked. Soren are found in all temperate and subarctic regions, though not at high altitude. A less common subspecies is the black soren, which has darker bark and larger, wider leaves.
Iel/dream tree. A spindly, smooth-barked desert tree found only in the magic-saturated wasteland of Aervach and its' Yezadran fringes. This tree produces fingernail-sized green leaves in profusion along its twiglike branches, and blooms in multitudes of heady-scented, tiny yellow blossoms in the spring. These flowers, the tree's bark and the sap are used in distilling Iel, a potent faintly golden alcohol with euphoric and sometimes hallucinogenic properties. In combination with other alcohols--particularly chana--it becomes toxic.
Indigo tree. Hard, blue-black wood covered by scaly black bark, oval-shaped blue-green leaves and thick black sap. Most often gnarled and short with widespread branches. They flower in the summer, with tiny pale blue blossoms that cluster on a stem and drop a lot of pale blue pollen. Small round black nuts grow in the autumn, and are slightly bitter unless boiled. The nutmeat is a dark brown-black. The sap of this tree can be boiled into thick, sweetish syrup of a strange dark indigo color, and even refined into sugar--though the sugar retains a faint blue tint. Juices of the leaves stain hands and clothing a similar shade, and are often used as dyes and inks. Indigo trees are most often found in the northern sub-arctic scrub around Krovichanka, Gejara and the northwestern Baronies. It is sometimes called inkwood.
Kalcha tree. A squat tree with subdivided trunks and thick, knobby branches. It has broad, thick-petaled white flowers in the spring, that release a heavy amount of yellow pollen. Its leaves are deep green and almost circular, while the bark is relatively smooth and grey. It bears fleshy, fist-sized yellow fruit after the flowers have fallen; the kalcha fruit have a smooth mottled skin, and are very juicy and easily split into two halves, each bearing a small pit near the joining. Reaching a maximum height of thirty feet, kalcha trees are found in the Brother Islands, south of the Atharenix and into Ciri'theen, in the fringes of the Naza swamp, and in the more swampy areas of Hjaltar. They can also be spotted infrequently along the rivers and pre-jungle of Yezadra and Zhangi-Uru.
Rainbowwood tree. Hard but pliable golden wood with streaks of red, brown, white and pale green. The bark is silvery-grey, and the leaves are three-parted, pale green, red and gold all spring, summer and autumn. They flower in spring with a profusion of bright, sweet-smelling round pink and scarlet blossoms, and after the petals fall, the green nubs that they had surrounded progress into very small, sour yellow-green fruits (called rainers) that fall in autumn. These trees grow mainly around Haaraka and the northern shore of the Atharenix Sea, and a large proportion of them have Tree Folk. The flower-petals are often rolled into incense and beads, and said to have soothing properties.
Rince tree. A type of citrus tree, small (about fifteen feet at full height) but wide and gnarly with dark bark and wide spade-shaped leaves. The rince bears the fruit of the same name: small, hard-rinded, unsegmented fruits that range in color from pinkish to yellow-green, skipping the red and orange colors. They contain the usual citrusy innards minus segment membranes, and include small rugged brown seeds with slick tan covers. The rince fruit is very sour and in fact mildly toxic when unripe; the juice is used to induce nausea. On the other hand, the rind and softer membrane is often dried and ground up to treat nausea. Beyond the medicinal, rince is used in marmalade and other sour preserves, juiced for cocktails, made into candies and for flavoring. Wild rince can be found in Padras, Hjaltar, the Brother Islands and parts of southern Illane. The three main types--pink, golden and green--vary little in taste. However, the motley rince, a specially-bred Brother Nations variant, is sweeter and non-toxic though still quite sour in itself. Motley rince are green at the twig joint, and red at the bottom.
Spurbark fir. A knobby evergreen found in high-altitude and mountainous regions, and characterized particularly by its spiky, almost hooked red-brown bark. In the early stages of the tree's life, the bark--including spurs--is soft and slightly pliable, but as the tree grows out of its sapling phase the bark hardens into thick scales. The hook-shaped seeds form beneath these scales every year, forcing out the scales slightly and protruding their curved tails out from underneath. They attach by the tails to birds or other animals that brush against them, thus sowing the seeds across great distances. Because the seeds grow under the bark rather than from specific points on branches, the wood beneath the bark is marked all over with the nodules from which the seeds regularly grow. These can be tapped during off-season to drain resinous sap, which is made into pitch-tar. The knobby wood is not considered useful for building or carving; thus, it is one tree that remains relatively untouched during logging. The needles are a dark blue-green.
Wisp reed. A pale cane-like type of tree found in moist or swampy regions. At full height, they can top fifteen feet, but are often found leaning or bent over. Their base segments are much wider than their upper segments, and they seem to narrow into points when fully grown. Broad blade-shaped light green leaves grow from the cane joints, as well as additional branching segments. Wide butter-yellow flowers form from small stems at the joints of the branches of a mature tree during springtime; when the petals fall, the bulbs they hid continue to grow, and by mid-summer they reach fist-sized and take on a phosphorescent yellow-green glow. These bulbs, called ghostfruit, are toxic to humans but are harvested for making dyes, poisons, the drug ghost-dust, and as temporary light-sources. Once taken from the reed, the glow fades within five days, leaving a dull yellow sheath of pulp around millions of tiny brown seeds.
Bellcone pine. Temperate and arctic pine notable for its bell-shaped cones.