Someone called out, "We blew a fuse!" Around a corner, there were six men, ranging in age from early 30s to early 70s, who were, until they lost power, carving totem-pole figures from enormous tree trunks of ash, maple or pine that had been trucked in from Napanoch, N.Y., in the Catskills.
Drill a pencil-thin hole in the trunk of a maple tree in late March, when the nights are frigid and the days thawing, and you can collect a good quantity of sap to boil down and make maple syrup.
Big River Fish, around a bend on Route 100, announces itself with two hand-painted wooden signs, one facing north and one south, against the trunk of a maple tree.
Formality is entirely left behind by the time you get down into this part of the garden, where huge jumbles of granite boulders, dumped by the last ice age, still sit among the trunks of fancy maples, overlaid with moss and fringed with ferns.
Several of the fences are down — intentionally — and in two of the pastures lie the trunks of dead sugar maples, cut into log lengths.
The curved trunk of a Norway maple tree, on a slope near the retaining wall at Seventh Avenue, is covered with vines and looks dressed, as if it were a tribal warrior descending a hill.
Amid bronze-leaved Japanese maples and ancient cedars whose corded trunks reach straight and tall to the sky, Mr. and Mrs. Vancouver and their kids throng Stanley Park on foot, in horse-drawn carriages, on bicycles, on in-line skates.
I slept that night in the crotched trunk of a dead old maple tree.
Instead, they have been clipped and trimmed religiously since the village was built in 1929, while Japanese elms, Zelkova serrata and Japanese maples have been "bonsaied" and now have shapely trunks and elegant forms.
Fine, papery peelings constantly curl away from the bark of the paperbark maple (Acer griseum) and the river birch as their trunks expand in girth.
