The vegetative state of trees

Even trees get sick and sometimes there is no other remedy than to cut them down. As lamed horses. With the difference that in comparison with the horses, the trunks of trees remain there, for  a time unpredicted, testimony of a previous life that only the  habitual attendees of certain streets are able to grasp. Only for them they assume an aspect of sepulchral cippuses.  

For the most they are plane trees. Probably because they are many. They were introduced in mass when Rome became the Italian capital in accordance with the taste that reigned then in other European cities. But even the pines get sick. A bit less the holm oaks. Rarely the palms. Often instead the locust trees, that apparently seem in good health, they reveal to be precarious. This happens because inside the wood tends to rot easily. They are among the trees that once cut, change more easily destination of use. As they induce who passes by distractedly to consider them a kind of trashcan for rubbish.        

To see them from on above, instead, these sections of trunk give the idea of little marble quarries. The various striations of the wood, different by colour, seem stratifications of rocky materials. Others, above all those more irregular, already in some measure rotten, of extinct volcanoes. Islands of basalt just emerged from the sea. What happens under there?  It becomes spontaneous to ask. You never lose hope that sooner or later from the roots send a burst capable of waking up again that mass of material without apparent life.  At times this happens. And so on the side you see tillers break, exaggeratedly long and thin. It does not matter how long they last and that they never take the semblance of real and proper tree.