Japanese trees

The American news on the internet had an article about how, because of global warming, the old trees are dying all across the US. This made me think about trees, which in turn reminded me that I had taken a picture of a typical Japanese city tree, but had forgotten to post it here.


This picture, taken only a few days ago, is on the main road only a couple of hundred meters from my building.

Periodically the city has people come around and trim the trees. I think they do it once during the summer and then again in the fall after all the leaves have gone. The result, as you can see, is a very strange but in some ways beautiful shape. Each of the main branches ends in a knob with very small limbs coming out of the bump. Also the top of the trunk in cut so it too ends in a knob. In the summer, when covered with leaves, these trees have a very distinctive shape.

One point about these fantastic-looking trees is that they make good subjects for drawings. I have done a number of pictures with this sort of tree as the focus, and I am sure that I will do many more in the future. In fact I have encouraged by some people to do a set of postcards illustrating different sorts of trees but I have not had the time so far.