As usual, most of my steps were from walking, but I was more interested in cycling. One of the signs of spring I saw was very young lambs, either resting or jumping around rather than walking. But I didn't take pictures of lambs, I took pictures of dead or truncated trees. That's how I roll.
There was a pile of tree trunks at the edge of a park in Nieuwegein. It looks like they're still cleaning up the results of the storms in February.
For the first time ever, I could see Heemstede castle (unrelated to the town of Heemstede) from a distance. Unfortunately, this was also the result of missing trees.
I rode through the countryside to the west of the city. Here I noticed a row of knotted willows that were recently pollarded:
This is a very common tradition in the Netherlands. Willow shoots are harvested every few years, when they look like this:
These willows are very resilient and will stay alive when their trunk is hollow. You'd think this one would be dead, but the middle part is still budding:
From the resilience of nature to the fragility of the city. This is supposed to be the second center of Utrecht, on top of the A2 highway:
There are some nicer streets with shops, but it's weird that "Leidsche Rijn Centrum" isn't finished yet more than two decades after development of the Leidsche Rijn district started.
At least we're building now... And here's a nice idea: the former roof of a train station has been moved to a place for open-air events or markets.
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Pollarding willows goes on around here too. I would see it along the river where I used to live. That was a nice long ride.
!PIZZA
Yes, I looked up what it's called in English and I saw even forest trees were sometimes pollarded in England.
Btw, I just remembered my grandpa, a farmworker born in 1899, used to weave baskets from these twigs. That was one of the few jobs he could do during the winter. My father told me he'd get whipped 'by accident' when he came too close while his father was weaving a basket.
I bet a lot of weaving went on as people would make stuff to sell. When I was at school we made some baskets, but we used plastic rather than twigs. I expect it was tough on the hands.
Yeah sure, he had thick callouses on his hand. His summer job was mowing grass using a scythe. Our neighbor kept doing that around his place and ours until the 1990s. It was impressive, he'd be done with a small field on a slope before you could get a mower ready.
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