In winter, you see trees like these everywhere, down the main streets of tiny villages, in yards, in parks. The process of pruning off every last shoot is called pollarding, a technique of woodland management that allows new wood to be cut off every year and used for firewood. It seems like an awful lot of work when most of the time firewood seems unlikely to be the goal. Perhaps keeping the canopy small also means fewer pests and diseases; at least there isn't any possibility of branches snapping into power lines during ice storms, of which we've had exactly zero so far.
I think the point of pollarding is aesthetic. At first, the sight of those stubby tree trunks depressed me. So ugly! So deformed! But I have four of them in my backyard, and a long line of them in the village, and so I look at them every day. And after some months of seeing them in different weathers, and I suppose with me in different moods, the pollarded trees now look beautiful to me. So many things in France are obviously, easily beautiful. But almost better are the things, like escargots, that take some getting used to. And maybe jolie-laide is especially appealing to the middle-aged.
Partly it's the knobbiness of the stubs that are left, and the way they make such a hard silhouette against the winter sky or the sides of buildings. There's an elegance to the spareness, to the baldness. Partly it's the way the habit of pollarding is one of the French rituals that mark a time of year. These rituals -- mostly I mean agricultural or arboricultural ones, but also religious and otherwise -- are like chimes ringing, giving a rhythm to the passing months the way the village church bells now give a rhythm to my days.
The other reason I've come to love them is that I know when spring comes, those pollarded trees are going to be sending out shoots in a dramatic frenzy, and I'm looking forward to the thrill of it. The transformation from stubs to a round head of leaves will be fast and furious, and I'm imagining sitting in a chaise, reading and eating an ice cream cone, watching the shoots fly out over my head.
