Thematic Photographic - Lines

Every week Carmi at Written, Inc. poses a theme for photographic inspiration. This week's theme is LINES.

Here, in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris, trees are grown in straight lines, and pruned to heighten the impression of a long alley receding into the distance.

This technique is known as "pleaching" where the young trees are shaped by training and pruning to form a thick flat wall of foliage. In some cases the branches of adjacent trees are scarred and bound together, joining them in a solid mass of foliage.

In Europe, it's common to see this technique used with trees from the genus Tilia, also called Lime trees or Linden trees. I think these trees at the Jardin de Palais-Royal are Lime Trees.