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Updated: June 3, 2025
He set out for solitary walks into the country. There was a little stream, with pollards on both sides of it, that ran through green fields, and it made him happy, he knew not why, to wander along its banks. When he was tired he lay face-downward on the grass and watched the eager scurrying of minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to saunter round the precincts.
The line dwindled as the shorn pollards gave up their withes to bind the vines to the dwarf maples. But she would not have been Emma Verplanck if the manner of her not impossible surrender had not troubled her more than the act itself. Any lack of tact on the part of the husbandman might still spoil things.
We had now reached a low waste of unenclosed land, with sedge and gorse pricking up everywhere through the snow, and with long lines of pollards marking the bed of a frozen stream. Near the line was a deserted brick-kiln, surrounded by long uneven mounds and ridges of ice, with three poplars mounting guard over it.
It had none of the feudal characteristics of ancient parks, with giant oaks, fantastic pollards, glens covered with fern, and deer grouped upon the slopes; on the contrary, in spite of some fine trees, chiefly beech, the impression conveyed was, that it was a new place, a made place.
We landed in a soiled meadow among some pollards, and there smoked a pipe in a flaw of fair weather. But the wind blew so hard, we could get little else to smoke. There were no natural objects in the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A group of children headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a little distance all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they thought of us.
There was a light mist over the watercourses, veiling the pollards and thorn trees and the reddening thickets of Ansdore's bush a flavour of salt was in it, for the tides were high in the channels, and the sunset breeze was blowing from Rye Bay.
Perhaps it is felt most by the poor, with the rich it may be less intense too much diffused and spread out, becoming thin by expansion, like leaf-gold; the little of the poor may be not only more precious, but more pleasant to them: certain that bit of grassy and blossomy earth, with its green knolls and tufted bushes, its old pollards wreathed with ivy, and its bright and babbling waters, is very dear to me.
And it is not unworthy of remark, that the bees came in greater clusters to Grassdale than to any other part of that rich and cultivated district. A small piece of waste land, which was intersected by a brook, fringed with ozier and dwarf and fantastic pollards, afforded pasture for a few cows, and the only carrier's solitary horse.
The only trees are dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in reality deserted.
The special culture of the country more and more special as we run eastward is that of the mulberry, the almond, and the olive. Along every hill-side, down every glen, lie orchard-rows of the precious pollards. Very ancient are some of these olives, or rather, olive-groups.
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