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Updated: June 21, 2025
When trees are planted close together, as in the beech-forests of the Continent, they climb to great heights in their struggle for air and light, but they make no lateral growth. When trees are pollarded, they make abundant lateral growth, but they cease to climb upward.
The rows of trees on each side of these never-ending avenues are of the ugliest sort and figure possible: tall poplars stripped almost to the top, as you would strip a pen, and pollarded willows: the giant poplar and the dwarf willow placed side by side alternately, knight and squire.
And always there was the buzz of flies swarming in the sunlight of the open doorway, the dry rustle of the pollarded lime-trees in the sharp wind outside, the bleating of some released ewe, upset at her own nakedness, the scrape and shuffle of heels and sheep's limbs on the floor, together with the "click-clip, click-clip" of the shears.
The Royal Headquarters had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and I was staring with all my eyes at a fresh-faced, white-haired old gentleman who was sitting in one of the windows of Guepratt's Hotel and whom I knew from the pictures to be King Wilhelm. Two officers in general's undress uniform were walking up and down under the pollarded lime-trees, talking as they walked.
At a cross-road at the bottom of a hill, on the way to a gun-position we once had, stood a Calvary one of those wayside altars, so frequently met in France, with pollarded trees surrounding it and an image of Christ in His agony. Pious peasants on their journey to market or as they worked in the fields, had been accustomed to raise their eyes to it and cross themselves.
Howard pushed on, walking lightly and rapidly, and found himself at last at Barton, one of those entirely delightful pastoral villages that push up so close to Cambridge on every side; a vague collection of quaint irregular cottages, whitewashed and thatched, with bits of green common interspersed, an old manorial farm with its byres and ricks, surrounded by a moat fringed with little pollarded elms.
At Pontassieve we stopped a while for coffee at an inn at the corner of the square of pollarded limes, and while it was preparing watched the little crumbling town at work, particularly the cooper opposite, who was finishing a massive cask within whose recesses good Chianti is doubtless now maturing; and then on the white road again, to the turning, a mile farther on, to the left, where one bids the Arno farewell till the late afternoon.
The miserable ranks of distorted and pollarded trees stood sadly in pools of yellow-stained water, or stuck out of heaps of half-melted and uncleanly snow. No colour; no life anywhere, excepting an occasional peasant plodding along a muddy road, sheltering himself under the characteristic flat and bony umbrella of the country. At Peschiera we had promise of better things.
His love of the woman disappeared in his desire to save, the idea which she represented at that moment; and lost in sentiment he stood watching the white sickle of the moon over against the dim village. The leaves of some pollarded willows whitened when the breeze shot them up to the light, and a moment after became quite distinct in the glare and the steam of an approaching engine.
Willis said he often wondered what took so many foreigners, that is, Protestants, to Rome; it was so dreary, so melancholy a place; a number of old, crumbling, shapeless brick masses, the ground unlevelled, the straight causeways fenced by high monotonous walls, the points of attraction straggling over broad solitudes, faded palaces, trees universally pollarded, streets ankle deep in filth or eyes-and-mouth deep in a cloud of whirling dust and straws, the climate most capricious, the evening air most perilous.
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