Zeltus

Summer gave way all to easily to Autumn and whilst it was a superb season while it lasted, Autumn is now gently allowing Winter to creep in. Time to start preparing to move out until the warm weather returns in Spring.

The leaves on the trees, after the best display we’ve ever seen, are now dropping rapidly, and it is time to pollard our Poplar trees.

The French are very enthusiastic about the practice of pollarding. And generally I am happy to believe they know what they are doing and follow their example. This decorative pollarding does mean that an otherwise large tree is kept to a reasonable garden size. The French leave a finger on each stump and I blithely follow their lead. I’ve no idea what it achieves but I would hazard a guess it’s to encourage the tree to sprout new growth as soon as possible in the Spring.

The newly pollarded trees look very bare and sorry for themselves. Not at all a pretty result. But in the Spring, they’ll all come good and look very attractive throughout the Summer.

Before coming across this form of pollarding, my understanding of the word was to describe a large mature Elm or Oak that had been completely decapitated in it’s youth as a source of a decent stave, long, long ago and had survived the experience by growing ever more lustily.

Indeed, many of the large, mature trees seen today (or rather, where Elms are concerned, the pictures of large mature trees :-( ) quite probably underwent this treatment. Yet most of us think this is the normal and natural shape of a mature tree. Does anybody still remember the Umbrella Tree, near the bottom of Salford road on the hill up to Cranfield? A magnificent example that like so many, succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the 70′s, it was a classic mature pollard.

Finally, despite their love of the practice, the French appear to have no special name for it. They at best make use of the verb tailler – “to prune”. Sometimes, French is a romantic, expressive language. And at other times, it is quite earthy and plain – there seems to be very little middle ground.

This also highlights one of the benefits of the English language – very little of it is English, it’s all been stolen from other languages. And is all the richer for it. The French attempt to protect their language from external influence is, of course, a fool’s errand.

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