Pollarded!

The music concourse in Golden Gate Park is unusual in that it's a highly organized, structured landscape. It represents the European ideal of a manicured public space, where the rest of the park, more or less, seeks to emulate a sort of wilderness. From the clay ground cover, to the fountains and monuments (note how most of the park's statues are found in the vicinity), from the grandiose Spreckels Temple of Music, to the pollarded* Elm and Sycamore, it's a buttoned-up sort of place. Originally the site of the 1894 Mid-Winter Exposition, the concourse has undergone a major renovation since the construction of the new De Young Museum and the California Academy of Sciences. It's a wonderful place for people watching on a busy day (there are many since the reopening of the Academy).

*A tree whose top branches have been cut back to the trunk so that it may produce a dense growth of new shoots.