Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1433/en

The Oak, Its Bark and Outer Bark

Among the preparation plants, the oak — the pedunculate oak (*Quercus robur*) — is the most representative woody perennial plant of our latitudes. Its bark and outer bark are used for the preparation. This is all the more remarkable given that, with all the other preparation plants, the flower heads — or, as with the stinging nettle, on account of its flower-like nature, the entire shoot — are used for the preparation. The flower of the oak is monoecious and even less conspicuous than that of the stinging nettle. Only in the form of its leaves and in its fruiting body seated in a cup — the acorn — does the type of this tree reveal itself unmistakably. If one wishes to approach, in pictorial beholding, the uniqueness of the oak's tree-nature, one must turn one's gaze to the slow, gradual becoming of its mighty, self-asserting, sturdy-gnarled gestalt — and, against this background, to the substance-process that manifests on the one hand in the formation of bark and outer bark, and on the other in the hard, resistant heartwood. This substance-process radiates outward and inward from the living cambium zone and, as the end-product of plant becoming, approaches once more in each direction the mineral. Spiritual research points in this regard to the significance of the calcium process in oak bark and to how this keeps plants healthy: it "creates order when the etheric body is working too strongly." In the living zone — the bast of the bark — alongside tanning agents and other aromatic substances, an organic calcium compound forms in individual cells: calcium oxalate, which crystallises in the cell vacuoles and, in the outer bark, forms into crystal druses and, being poorly soluble in water, persists there for a long time.