A thousand sleeping fires

I hold a thousand sleeping fires
wrapped tight in wooden scales.
I am not born to bloom for you,
but to wait until nature tells.

I fall, and still I do not open;
some of my kin need flame to speak.
I count in spirals, both ways at once,
numbers hidden in how I’m made.

I have no roots, and yet I carry
the whole of a future forest.
Autumn drops me without a word,
winter buries me in white.

What am I,
that holds beginnings closed like a fist,
and only surrenders them
to heat, or time, or patience?