With such a fearsome environment on the ground (or water, or intermediary muck), it is not surprising that some of those wretched creatures who must make this miserable land - or, rather, swamp - their home have retreated to the trees. Some of these trees rise above the few actual hillocks of dry land. Others are rooted below the depths, rising stilt-like above the waters. Some grow on the floating islands of buoyant peat and floating coral, while yet others float by independent means.
Types of Inhabited Trees
Obelisk Pines
The Obelisk Pine is a rare find in these parts, a tall and stately tree, dark and closed-needled, which rises high and proud above the dark waters, sinking its great taproot far below the water as much to secure an actual firm hold upon the solid earth below as to seek the mineral resources there which give the Obelisk Pine such strength.
Some folk make use of its spiral pattern of horizontal branching. Their structures are like big spiral stairs wrapped about the lone "home trees" of their "single steads" or the clusters of trees linked by swaying, rope-bound branch treads of aerial causeways that tie their thorps together.
Mangroves
Dwarf mangroves, growing two to four arm-spans above the water surface, are quite common, a form of brush knitting together shallows, mudflats, and low land areas by thrusting roots out horizontally from the lower branches, roots which curve downwards only when their weight grows too great to support. When these roots finally arc down to the water, they grow on down the much below. One rooted in the muck or soil below, the mid part of the root, where it is just curving down, sprouts branches which curve out and then up. A wide thicket may actually be comprised of only a few trees, their roots and branched intermeshed as they loop from place to place.
The Giant Mangrove, while similar in growth pattern, has roots and branches whose girth is not measured by a hand-span or but by as much as a half dozen arm-spans.
Blackwater Forest is an area of just such giant mangroves. The Goblyn inhabiting the forest keep certain channels through the maze of roots clear for their slender skiffs. The extensive network of Goblyn villages, collectively comprising a large but dispersed town, is neigh invisible in the dark of the leaf-shadowed wood. The structures are, for the most part, built upon the network of roughly horizontal root and branch bases, which together form a rough scaffolding for extensive, if uneven, wooden floorings, for both the villages themselves and for actual wooden roadways linking them. Smaller structures may be as little as mere "crows' nest" clinging to a vertical support, linked only by a rope ladder.
Other Trees
Cask Cypress
Cask cypress drift through lakes and swamps, buoyed by the great hollow barrel-like floats grown by their roots like clusters of giant nuts. Should they run aground, they will root into the muck or soil readily enough. While grounded trees may reproduce in the usual way, they may become cut off from open water, and unable to spit off roots sections, like clusters of huge nuts, to float off and grow into a new tree. In preparation for this even, their roots grow great, tall "knees," rather like regular swamp cypress, but these develop into secondary trunks. It is not unusual to find whole floating thickets of these trunks, a cops of cypress trees linked below the surface by a shared root system underpinned by barrel-like floats.