If you go like, to a tree or certain lower ground bushes and look at a fixed point while spinning, chunks of the plants seem to rotate in this strange manner, as if they were attached to you more than they were the tree. Its jarring and strange.

You're seeing http://SpeedTree technology in action. In order to render a large game world all at once they have to cut corners to reduce strain on CPUs and GPUs.

It costs much less processing power to render a flat surface in a video game than a three-dimensional surface. So objects like trees and bushes in the distance are flat. But to keep you from noticing that they are flat they rotate the trees so that the flat surface always faces the player character. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.

They cut other corners to render all of Cyridiil at once. Textures in the distance are very un-detailed, buildings are very low-polygon. They didn't need to do this with earlier games like Morrowind because distant objects were not rendered at all. The lack of distant objects was disguised with fog.

That's the reason I don't look too closely at the bushes and such. Seeing them rotate like that just makes me feel a bit dizzy.

Knew about the other stuff, but not the trees. Thanks! was exactly what i wanted to know. It also explains the odd "The trees look like someone badly photoshopped them to make them look bigger" issue i get at some mid-range distances.