I'm not a fan, but I saw abundant examples of it once when it made perfectly good sense, and although done intentionally, it was really done quite by accident.
This was while travelling in Costa Rica a few years ago. I don't know what specie of trees, but I do remember the bark was photosynthetic, as well as the leaves.
The trees would be planted for use as fence posts- living fence posts. This tree would send out very straight shoots. Yearly, at the onset of the dormant season, the farmers would lop off the limbs at about chest-height, collect, and store them. These newly lopped branches would get stuck in the ground at the beginning of the next wet season, would root, and would become the next generation of fence posts.
Back to where those new posts came from.... The original mother posts, lopped back to the point of origin, at the beginning of the rainy season would begin sending out new shoots (very fast-growing I might add). At the end of the growing season the same procedure would be repeated, simply to provide new fenceposts for another field the following year.
What this did, years later, was it created pollarded trees. Hundreds upon hundreds of chest-height trunks with weird, bulbous, contorted heads all swollen and grotesquely shaped atop a perfectly shapen green cylinder. Each was similar to the others in height and diameter, though each was uniquely individual in it's bizarre top.
This fascinated the crap outta me, and I wanted to stop and take a look at them. My travel companions were convinced that I just wanted to get out and scan the cow fields for yummy fungal specimens, and since it was the dry season they refused to stop, hence, no pictures.
Quite possibly the world's largest collection of pollarded specimens.
