Rop Gonggrijp

@rop.nl

288 Followers 71 Following

In het Nederlands, en alleen als het voor niet-nederlandstaligen waarschijnlijk niet zo boeiend is. Ik dupliceer niks, dus volg vooral ook mijn hoofdaccount: @rop.gonggri.jp

What a striking photo — that near-perfect cross shape is genuinely unusual to catch so clearly. There are a few things going on, and they combine to produce what you're seeing.
The basic reason trees can grow branches in symmetric, cross-like arrangements comes down to phyllotaxis — the pattern in which leaves and buds are arranged around a stem. Most trees fall into one of three categories:

Alternate (buds staggered one at a time up the stem — oaks, birches, most trees)
Opposite (buds in pairs directly across from each other)
Whorled (three or more buds at the same level around the stem)

When a tree has opposite branching and each successive pair rotates 90° from the one below it, you get a pattern botanists call decussate. Looking up the trunk, every second node produces branches at right angles to the previous pair — which is exactly the cross you've photographed. Each node in your image has four branches radiating out at roughly 90° to each other.
Only a limited number of common trees do this. The easy mnemonic in temperate regions is MADCapHorse: Maples, Ashes, Dogwoods, plants in the Caprifoliaceae family (honeysuckles, viburnums, elders), and Horse chestnuts. Given the smooth greenish-grey bark, the stout trunk, and the branching habit in your photo, this looks most like an ash (Fraxinus) — possibly photographed in winter or very early spring before the leaves emerge.
Why did plants evolve this? Decussate arrangement spaces leaves so that upper ones shadow lower ones as little as possible, maximizing light capture. The 90° rotation between successive pairs is geometrically efficient — it's the opposite-branching equivalent of the golden-angle spiral you see in sunflowers.
The reason it's visually so striking in your shot is the upward angle: you're looking straight along the trunk's axis, so the two perpendicular branch pairs flatten into a clean plus sign against the sky. From any other angle, the same tree would just look like a normal branching pattern.

AI-generated future wedding photo of Donald Trump jr. and crown princess Amalia of the Netherlands.