Woodland and timber

La taille en têtard is pollarding, and the noun inside it is a head. Le têtard is built on la tête with the suffix -ard, and it names two things at once: the tadpole, which is mostly head, and the tree cut back year after year until the trunk ends in a swollen knob of regrowth. French saw the same shape in both. What makes this worth stopping over is that English did exactly the same thing twice and hid it both times. « Pollard » is « poll » — an old word for the head, still alive in « poll tax » and in the « polled » cattle bred without horns — carrying that very same -ard. And « tadpole » is tadde, the toad, joined to the same pol: a toad-head. So the cut willow of the water meadow and the creature in the pond are head-words in English quite as much as in French, and a reader who files têtard away as a bare item of forestry vocabulary is filing away a word he already owns twice over, and the suffix on the end of it came out of the same Germanic stock in both languages.