Many, many times I’ve been under this tree down the hill from our house; recently I really looked at it for the first time. It grows as one oak tree, but originally there were three individual ones. As they grew their trunks united at the base; two of them grew together again higher up where they rubbed each other, and then separately once more. It makes quite the sculpture, this intertwining dance of three trees in one. Conventional thinking usually assumes that trees too close together compete for resources—this looks more like cooperation.