recursing down a tree

hi,

say i have a table with something like

id,parent,description

and parent points to an id of the very same table. now i have
a specific id and i want to recurse down the tree to the root.
is it in any way possible to do that without to doing a sql query 
for each level ? until today i always saved the parent and formulated
a new query using it to get the next upper level. however, it seems to
me that this might be quite some work given a tree of a larger size.

thanks for your ideas
carl