Hey, everyone!

I just performed a miscellaneous task obtained at the Sleeping Tree Camp, which is a short jaunt west-southwest of Whiterun. Within the camp's cave is the corpse of an Orc named Urag, which in turn holds a note from Ysolda in Whiterun about Sleeping Tree Sap. You can bring the note to Ysolda and she'll deliver a brief bit of lore exposition on the Sleeping Tree. According to her, popular folklore claims that the Sleeping Tree either:

-Grew from Vvardenfell debris blown into Skyrim by the Red Year eruption, or
-Grew from something that fell from a "floating island", which, according to her, sounds like nonsense.

The latter scenario almost certainly refers to Umbriel. This seems like a more credible origin for the tree given its appearance: it has a sort of ethereal purple glow, which is also imparted to the pool of water surrounding it. The bark itself is similar to a typical Skyrim tree, save a healthy helping of lavender-tinted mottling.

A quick forum search didn't turn up any results about this, and references to the Umbriel incident itself are rare in Skyrim - this is the only one I'm aware of. It's likely one of the Histlike trees seen in Umbriel's garden, if it is indeed a product of that realm.

Thoughts on this? Is an Umbrielic origin as sure a thing as I think it is? Skyrim was not, as far as I remember, under Umbriel's direct path, but a seed or spore could have been carried into Skyrim by the wind or some other natural process. Is the Red Year hypothesis more likely? Is it possible that both hypotheses are just fanciful folkloric nonsense, and this is just a really weird tree (this, mercifully, is unlikely, given the setting we're dealing with )? What might be the implications of this little chunk of Vile's realm sitting in Skyrim?

edit: My sincerest apologies if this has already been covered and my search just missed the reference.

The tree's sap gives you a wicked fortify health effect (100 points for 60 seconds) and causes your vision to go hazy (road-side merchants would also sell it along with Moon Sugar and Skooma, reenforcing the drug-like notion). To me it sounds similar to the behavior of Hist sap. The water around the tree was also odd, which made me think the tree was having an effect on it, too.

I don't see how debris from Red Mountain's eruption could cause something like that, so I prefer the spore-of-Umbriel-Hist idea.

If Umbriel took creatures from Nirn, then what is to say it didnt take trees from Nirn too? It took ingredients, didnt it? If it picked a Hist tree or sapling up...
For all we know a Hist tree growing up separated from the rest of the Hist could become a normal tree, with no real sapient abilities... All speculation of course.

I'd like to believe that it's a spore from Umbriel. Umbriel was over Vvardenfell long enough to have easterly winds take it off. However, I wonder if any spores that got blown off of Umbriel would have been able to maintain their substance since it was a separation of Oblivion and Mundus, which is why nobody else could keep their physical form upon leaving?