My house is convienently placed on the 'Route des Plateaux' - once known as the D103. It goes to St Astier and should be named 'Route des Pins' for on both sides there are plantations of tall,skinny pine trees, naked from their roots until their crowning glory of leaves. I have a curious feeling that they are a recent plantation.
Driving between them is a curious sensation for while most of them away from the road reach high for the sky, possibly three houses high, the roadside ones seem to lean over passing cars. No, I do not know what variety of pines...some authorities suggest that there are a little short of 200 varieties. Then, suddenly, a large swaithe has been reduced to neat piles of naked wood, the heads nowhere to be seen.
Apparently most of these will end up as paper - perhaps supporting headlines in newspapers. Some might end up as those light-weight vegetable boxes that you tread down into firewood. Actually I have noticed that you can 'cut' them up with strong kitchen scissors...
And, once at a meeting of the local Foresters association, in which I am probably the oldest member in years, I remember complaining about these brief plantations for I have always thought of trees as near eternal deities, not something to be sown and harvested like ....leeks or palms....but something to be treasured and respected - like the ancient oaks.
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