The picture shows that it's surrounded by comrades. Those comrades are the shrubs around it. Until recently, this tree was the same way. Quoting the Wikipedia e

The picture shows that it's surrounded by comrades. Those comrades are the shrubs around it. Until recently, this tree was the same way. Quoting the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko : > For thousands of years, the tree appeared in a stunted shrub formation (also known as a krummholz formation) due to the harsh extremes of the environment in which it lives. During the warming of the last century, the tree has sprouted into a normal tree formation