Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1436/en

The shoot of the young oak climbs vertically upward with whorled branching and, in this growth-type, resembles that of other deciduous trees. Yet the archetypal image of the oak reveals itself unmistakably from youth onwards in the so characteristic, indented and lobed oak leaf. Only after some twenty years of its youth does the pedunculate oak's outward appearance change into the growth-form proper to it: the wide-spreading, irregularly open and light-filled tree crown (Fig. 29, p. 401). What had already announced itself in the form of the leaves from the very beginning takes hold of the whole tree with force in the decades that follow. The immense growth-force, which can persist even in a thousand-year-old oak, works in all its members as if dammed back — visible in how the leading shoots of the previous year are outgrown by lateral shoots, giving rise to the irregular course of the lateral branches that develop like trunks. Likewise the leaves pile up in clusters at the tip of each shoot; the trunk "dams itself" inward into the great hardness of the wood, outward into the condensing, durably adhering bark.