I have a tree on my property that I find inspiring. I don't know what that says about me, that I can be inspired by a tree, you'll have to ask my therapist, but it does. I call it the Tree That Won't Die.
It's a willow of some kind, growing by my pond. It was huge and healthy when we moved here, sadly I have no pics from then. We had a huge ice storm here in 2007, here's what it looked like:
Pretty flat. Didn't bother it one bit. Come spring you couldn't even tell. Then we had another ice storm in 2008 and that one broke it. The thing looks like it's really three trees growing from the same trunk, joined up to about a foot off the ground. This second storm split them, two are leaning way out over the bank and the third is actually laying horizontally in the pond.
That should have killed it. Nope. The thing adapted, the limbs that were on that trunk that's in the pond now actually bent, their upper portions are growing straight up now, and the thing is as happy as can be growing with the trunk and the bases of many of these branches underwater. The pond is kind of low in these pics, it's usually submerged.
And here are a couple of what have to be its children, as they've come up since we moved there, also happily growing from underwater.
I don't know what kind of tree this is, the conservation department won't come out and identify it, and it doesn't really matter. This thing is an inspiration, and has been a lesson to both of my children, and will be again when they're old enough to start taking biology lessons.