Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1442/en

Oaks do not begin to flower until the crown is fully formed. This is the case at around sixty years of age. One scarcely notices the flowering; only when, at this advanced age, the acorns fall in September and October does one become aware of the far-reaching change in the biography of the tree. Connecting with what has been considered above, the question arises: does not the oak flower and bear fruit long before it visibly flowers and bears fruit? In all tree-nature, and most representatively in the oak, the earth turns itself inside out. Does not this process of inversion already constitute a kind of flowering and fruiting process — only dammed back into trunk and branches, stuck, as it were, halfway along the way? If one takes a cross-section of an oak trunk, one can find in horizontal orientation the *Tria Principia* of Paracelsus reproduced in the formation of the trunk. In the outer zone of the trunk there appears, barely visible to the naked eye, the living layer of the cambium, which — concealed beneath the bark — envelops the tree like a green leaf. From this layer the conducting tissue of the *xylem* grows inward, drawing water and salts upward, and which — viewed horizontally — is, as it were, rooted in the living sapwood. Within the sapwood, as in the sorption complex of the soil, assimilates are stored and mobilised again. This is the zone of the "Sal" process. Toward the heartwood, the sapwood dies away; it mineralises, one might say, into heartwood through the deposition of wood substances such as lignins and tannin derivatives, as a protection against putrefaction.