-Ice Spirit Clan Plant: Orwund-
An Orwund is a type of tree that grows in the lowlands of the Ice Spirit homeworld. Orwunds are notoriously heavy due to being porous and absorbing huge amounts of water to sustain themselves. They are a prime wood used in making instruments and tools due to the rigidity gained when dry.
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Appearance
Orwunds are incredibly large trees with thick trunks and not very many branches. They are ideal trees, as branches never start any further than halfway down an individual tree's trunk. Suckers at the base are only a worry during the tree's sapling years. Mature Orwund trunks range from between 5 to 8 feet in diameter; the trees start out thick and stay that way. Branches are few and are not very bushy, as there is plenty of space in between each limb. Many specimens have their trunks split up near the top into two main branches; splitting earlier on in the tree's life is uncommon, and twinning due to two trees growing and fusing together is rare. Orwunds are coniferous trees, and their needles are large, blunt, and flat, more resembling deciduous leaves.
Growth
Orwunds are one of the few trees on the Ice Spirit homeworld that feed almost solely off of water. Being more aquatic, Orwunds will only grow in the warmer lowlands of the planet, and are especially plentiful near lakes and other bodies of water. Orwunds act like giant sponges, absorbing large amounts of water in their porous trunks and saturating their cores to the point of being nothing but pulp; a healthy Orwund is distinguished by a pulpy center, soft wood, and smooth outer bark. An Orwund in too dry of an area will be thinner, and its trunk will often split or have its bark peeling off. The center will be like compressed, dry dust, often described as a dry honeycomb because of the way it crumbles and its porous appearance. However, despite the core becoming useless sawdust once the wood is dry, the outer wood itself hardens into a tough, rigid state; with the proper treatment, it makes a resilient wood to craft with.
Uses
Orwunds are hardier trees, requiring tools to cut and shape. Ice Spirits often use water treatments to make individual pieces of wood pliable, and then mould them into the rough shapes that are desired before carving. Bending the wood grains in this matter (and knowing what one is doing in the process) can help make more rigid tools than cutting straight wood grains. Orwund is also used in a decorative manner for furniture, where multiple boards of wood will be bent and twisted into artistic shapes before drying into the new form. These shapes will then be framed with straight beams in order to make them sturdy. Because it takes a lot of cut straight wood to frame Orwund art and to make it usable, such pieces of furniture are exquisite and treasured.
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