Pine demise

As anyone knows who casts an eye over this blog from time to time, supermarkets are not my favourite places. One of my least favourite is the 'Leclerc' that sits at the edge of our town like a giant mutating virus, gradually spreading outwards, engulfing helpless small businesses and sucking in all shoppers.
The only thing, apart from the fact they sell offcut meat for dogs, that I like, or should say LIKED, about the place is/was the maverick Parasol Pine trees that some misguided person had decided on for the car park about forty years ago.
The trees (presumably small saplings) had been planted in well ordered lines to provide shade for cars. I can imagine the scene: French people in flares stepping from 2CV's and Renault 5s, admiring the shiny new supermarket and small pine trees gently swaying in the summer breeze. Perhaps a few of them might have thought 'I wonder what these trees will be like in forty years time or so, alors.'
What the car park designer hadn't considered was that the mature trees would send out pretty hefty root systems creating fissures and mountains in the once-perfect tarmac. I'd always liked the fact that the car park was filled with non-level cars as if bobbing on a dark grey sea; a reminder that man really has no control over nature, how ever much he tries to imprison it within sticky tarmac.
Of course the wobbly car park- and I like to think, sniggering trees - didn't eventually fit with Leclerc's shiny new shop extension . . .

I think Mark's photograph here captures the desolation of the non-tree car park on a grey Sunday morning alive only with the ghost-rustle of pine needles on a summer breeze (Sob).