The Flapping Forest is where Snodrog the pedant lived - and worked, if you want to call it that (The Pedant and the Shuffly, 7). Within the forest were "rotting crab-apple trees and quaking aspens...dying of Parkinson's disease" along a road leading past Snodrog's house. It was said "most travelers who ventured into the [forest] were not seen again" (17). This was because Snodrog ensnared those who passed his house with his logic traps and transformed them into Flimsies, large, fluttering, flapping linen napkin-like creatures. It is from this flapping the forest gets its name.
Later, when Sir Bertram Crabtree-Gore "[wanders] into the haunted wood" (17), one may suddenly wonder what, if anything, surrounds the Flapping Forest? I personally like to think it exists in some far-off nook or cranny in the Northern or Southern Kingdom (as described in The Face in the Frost).
The crab apple is a wild species of apple tree which generally yield small, bitter fruit [1].
Parkinson's disease is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. As the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms become more common, usually emerging slowly. Early in the disease, the most obvious symptoms are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking [2].
Apsen is the common name given to a deciduous tree native to cooler areas of North America, also referred to quaking aspen or trembling poplar. The trees have tall trunks, up to 82 feet tall, with smooth pale bark, scarred with black. The glossy green leaves, dull beneath, become golden to yellow (pictured), rarely red, in autumn [3]. The "trembling" name comes from their leaves. Flat leaves are attached to branches with lengthy stalks called petioles, which quake or tremble in light breezes. Bellairs associated their "trembling" with the tremors of trembling associated with Parkinson's disease.
The yellow leaves of aspens and pinkish-red blossoms of crab apple trees would make for a colorful forest, despite its sinsiter sounding name.
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