This past weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the country of Belgium. I hopped around to Brussels, Bruges and Ghent in a very short amount of time, but everywhere I went, I kept on noticing these very odd looking trees. They looked unlike anything I had ever seen before. After doing some research, I learned that the trees are lime trees that have been "pollarded," which means the upper branches are trimmed to control the height of the tree. It really changes the way the tree looks!
These trees are very Gothic looking. They look like they would fit right into the setting of a Tim Burton movie. The branches look somber, with many tree stumps growing out of the main tree trunk. A few very skinny branches grow out of the tree stump branches, but in this case, it was just enough for the trees to look like they were still alive. The trees did not look like something that would occur naturally, which is why I had to investigate how they came to look this way. Lime trees usually look like very different. The pollarding (pruning) prevents the trees from outgrowing their assigned space, which can be necessary in a city where trees have limited space.
