Why can't my huge trees be chopped down?
In my world there is a forest of huge trees which people can't or won't chop down. The trees are similar to redwood trees but they have a large crown and no lower branches. The forest is quite dark because the trees block out most of the sun. Due to the low light-levels, barely anything grows on the forest floor.
People are scared of the dark forest so it has become a refuge for bandits and other criminals. The forest is habitable but growing food that requires sunlight is impossible.
There is no cultural reason the trees are unable to be harvested, people have tried for a very long time. There is clear motivation to harvest the trees as the wood is highly valuable.
My world is inhabited by humans with roughly 11th to 15th century technology but no gunpowder.
The older trees are the size of the trees in the picture and the forest floor looks similar to the picture.
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They can't be cut down because they're bottle rockets writ large. Their core is a form of solid rocket fuel. As long as an unripened tree is safely encased in their stony bark they're 99.99999% proof against being touched off unintentionally - even a direct lightning strike is unlikely to affect them - and if it does it'll most likely cause them to "blow up on the pad", leaving a huge clearing in the forest. But when one gets fully ripe and the right conditions occur the tree will self-ignite, rise to great altitude, and then explode, scattering its seeds to the winds - and in the case of exceptionally large trees, to the stars.
However, if one dies and falls naturally, after a few years the volatile components of the fuel will evaporate or be chemically neutralized, rendering them (relatively) safe to handle and hardening the "wood".
Naturally, in the past the unknowing and the foolhardy have attempted to harvest the standing trees. They've generally died in a large explosion or, in rare cases, by being baked in the exhaust of a successful launch. After a while the standing trees are seen as "cursed" by the natives, who avoid them like a flaming plague from hell (which, in a way, they are).
See Larry Niven's classic story "A Relic of the Empire".
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