The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “A Yankee in Canada: With Anti-slavery and Reform Papers”, p.6