Italy Continued: Pruning

It's a funny thing about travel that the best, most impressive, things are usually surprises.  You can plan all you want, but the highlight ends up something you never thought about. And so it was on this trip.  The COG could not stop talking about pruning.  We have, of course, noticed before that there are all kinds of pruning techniques used in Europe that are not seen much in America.  But this trip was really eye-opening.  I think part of the reason is because trees weren't fully leafed out, so you could see what had been done.  It's rather ruthless - we didn't even realize you could do this to a plant and have it survive.  It's a way of making plants/trees do your bidding entirely.

Examples:
This is a walkway/road by the church in Ravello - do you see how the trees have been pruned back so that they will form an arch in the summer, but not get too big?

Here's a close-up:

And look at this one from the garden of the Villa Rufalo:

And there was a whole avenue of flowering trees leading to our flat. They were quite remarkable because in places so much had been pruned that the flowers were growing right on the stem. 

Look at this tree from the main square of Ravello - totally reshaped by the hand of man.

There were many other instances of pruning - roses pruned waaaaay back and pergola structures like this one, with vines pruned to create shade in summer.

So we talked about pruning the whole trip - it was probably our most frequent conversation after the one 'OMG isn't that beautiful and look over there.'