Cypress

Went to a cool park this weekend with lots of hiking trails and cypress ponds. A little muddy on the trails because of the rain/snow, but it was nice and warm already again, and the cypress ponds were strange and unearthly. I absolutely love them...my favorite thing about my new home is this landscape that I've never seen anywhere before.

Those weird pointy wooden things growing out of the ground are called cypress knees. They're weird spiky protuberances that grow up through the ground from cypress tree roots.

Scientists don't know what they're for. They've floated several theories, but none of them have proven conclusively correct. They may just be like nipples on a man, no specific purpose, just leftover from the eons of evolution.