Warty

"A gloomy house, set back in a sour-looking garden deep in rotten leaves. Dark evergreen bushes with sooty foliage dripping in the rain, and dirty water in the holes of the broken ashphalt path. It must have been pleasant at one time before the trees grew unkempt. A row of old leafless poplars with warty trunks closed like huge knotted fingers over the approach and frontage, shutting out the light and forming a gloomy tunnel."

The text is from Death on the Last Train by George Bellairs, published 1948. Bellairs wrote over 50 crime novels before and after WWII. Long out of print, they are now reissued by the British Library. We have loads now. Bellairs was a bank manager, and drew his characters from personal experience. His descriptions are exquisite. We have all walked up a garden path like the one described, and when he writes like this (which is all the time) we see it in our mind's eye. He leaves it there. No further description is necessary. And his one liners about people are something else.

So I've been contemplating what a warty tree might be. It's not a poplar, but this is as close as I can get. What do you think?