Oh, to be able to write like Willa Cather on cottonwoods! I must read more by her.
Willa Cather Quote from Death Comes For The Archbishop:
“Beside the river was a grove of tall, naked cottonwoods – trees of great antiquity and enormous size – so large that they seemed to belong to a bygone age. They grew far apart, and their strange twisted shapes much have come about from the ceaseless winds that bent them to the east and scoured them sand, and from the fact that they live with very little water; the river was nearly dry here for most of the year. The trees rose out of the ground at a slant; and forty or fifty feet above the earth all these white, dry trunks changed their direction, grew back over their base line. Some split into great forms which arched down almost to the ground; some did not fork at all, but the main trunk dipped downward in a strong curve, as if drawn by a bow-string; and some terminated in a thick coruscation of growth, like a crooked palm tree. They were all living trees, yet they seemed to be of old, dead, dry wood, and had very scant foliage. High up in the forks, or at the end of a preposterous length of twisted bough, would burst a faint bouquet of delicate green leaves – out of all keeping with the great lengths of seasoned white trunk and branches. The grove looked like winter wood of giant trees, with clusters of mistletoe growing among the bare branches.”
Forgotten Winds 