"I've never seen a pine do this before" Topic

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The pics are not as clear as I would wish, but what you are looking at is a large pine tree with the top gone, much of the north half of the trunk looks dead, while the south half supports weird growth. A limb started out of the west side, then turned vertical and became a whole new "baby" tree, complete with its own radial limbs. Around on the south side, an even larger limb did this phenomenon twice. It looks like the massive limb is the "ground" in which the two fledgling trees are growing.

Did you touch it?

If so I think the Men In Black might be paying you a little visit sometime soon.

Dan

We see that here quite often. People (rich people) get upset with the trees "ruining" their view, so they cut off the top of the tree. The tree responds as you see in GWA's photos. Problem is that the centre of balance for the tree ends up shifting laterally so as the tree's new top grows taller, it starts to pull the tree to the side so that it will eventually topple over (often in a strong wind that an undamaged tree would have survived). Trees can get several of these going so they end up looking like candelabras.

I get nothing but page can't be displayed.

I don't know why, Mithy. Sorry.

"Candelabras", good descriptive!

Well, "quite often" might be a function of where you live? As I said, this was a new thing for me, and I've been visiting our forests every year for most of my life. Maybe this is yet another case of coming late to the party, which happens to me quite a lot. I've actually walked by many of these, and only now do I take notice? I'll be able to answer that later, as I am on the lookout for these from this point on.

It's definitely a function of where I live – the trees I see this happen to have all had their tops cut off by people. It's much less common to see happening from a natural cause – maybe a lightning strike? Seeing the trees mutilated to "improve the view" always seems oxymoronic to me. Only maybe without the oxy- prefix…

Probably not the cause but once I had a Virginia Pine and an oak tree growing in proximity to each other. Whenever a branch of the oak tree would start to touch the pine it would die back. When the pine tree gave up the ghost (they don't live long in Central texas) the oak tree was left with a very lopsided shape.

Evergreens have some serious herbicidal defenses.

Haven't seen a lot of trees like the OP, at the lower elevations here the pinons don't get that large.

But not unusual as noted given the damage to the main trunk.

Have seen similar in deciduous species.