New South Wales does this thing with its trees and its power lines. The US may very well do this too, but I’d never noticed it, so I’m taking a moment to describe it.

Back when we were searching for a place to live, we visited a flat in a place galled Greystanes. The flat was nice looking, but it was one room with double glass doors facing the main socializing area of the family with young children that lived in the main house. Who smoked.

The real estate agent was very kind though we didn’t want the place, and gave us a ride back to the train station. She told us stories about landowners she had worked for.

One owner drove by a house he owned, and called the agent, furious. The top had been cut off of the palm tree in front of the property, and he blamed the tenants. Literally, the top had been cut off the top of the palm tree. There’s not much to a palm tree other than the top, you know. It turns out the local council maintenance folks had cut the tree in half because it was getting too close to the power lines.

Now, I don’t know how you would trim a palm tree if it really needed to be trimmed that didn’t involve cutting the top off, but it does make for a hilarious story.

(I still don’t understand why he would assume his tenants had cut his tree down, but whatever)

Anyway, the local councils are dedicated to keeping the power lines free of entanglement dangers.

And that leads to things such as this:

It’s just so perfectly round!