Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets great bunches of them in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses.
Far behind the corner of the house which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows.
And you might as well have made the bark of a Lombardy poplar serve for the trunk of some dwarfed and pollarded oak in whose hollow the Babes of the Wood could have slept at their ease as have fitted out Jackeymo from the garb of Riccabocca.
The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone.
Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall poplars pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a field a herd of brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to observance, doubtless, as color in some possible word-painting.
He had left the outskirts of the forest far behind, threading the rugged oaks, to make his way through the undergrowth that flourished amongst the beeches huge forest monarchs that had once been pollarded by the foresters of old, to sprout out again upon losing their heads into a cluster of fresh stems, each a big tree so ancient that, as the boy gazed back at them from where he wound his way in and out, following the curves and zigzags of the little river, he asked himself why it was that this tract of land was called the New Forest, where everything looked so old.
The further one goes the better it is, and the better also the river, which at the very end of the woods becomes such a stream as the pleinairistes love, with pollarded trees on either side. Among the trees of one of these woods nearly a hundred years ago, a walking Englishman named Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his "Ode to the West Wind".
Above the stack, distant about five-and-twenty yards, stood a couple of stout pollarded willows, and by these Uncle Chirgwin had decided to moor his hay, trusting that they might hold the great mass of it secure even though the threatened flood swept away its foundations.
The country here is more woody than on the high lands we had left, but the trees are not in general large. Great numbers of them have been broken off by elephants a foot or two from the ground: they thus seem pollarded from that point. This animal never seriously lessens the number of trees; indeed, I have often been struck by the very little damage he does in a forest.
There is a row of pollarded willows standing parallel to our front, a hundred and fifty yards away. Up, or in, one of these lives Zacchaeus. We have never seen him, but we know he is there; because if you look over the top of the parapet he shoots you through the head. We do not even know which of the trees he lives in.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking