In a forest near the town of Gryfino, Poland, there are 400 pine trees with unusually curved trunks. …How these trees all grew with an identical curve is a mystery. They are estimated to have been planted sometime in the early 1930s. During World War II, Gryfino was invaded and destroyed, and its residents had to abandon the town, including those who planted and knew the secrets of the forest. …Gary Coleman, an associate professor at the University of Maryland [surmised] …that a localized storm could explain the Polish crooked trees. …after somehow ending up in a horizontal position, their trunks began growing so that they were parallel to gravity. Trees have starch grains within their cells that cause this reorientation. “It’s actually the movement of these starch grains in these cells that triggers these responses,” Coleman says.